


From the Fires

by pantykinksam



Series: After the Fact [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Boy King of Hell Sam Winchester, Camping, Codependency, Dead John Winchester, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fluff and Angst, Impala Makeouts, Kissing, M/M, Protective Dean Winchester, Sad Dean Winchester, Sam Winchester's Demonic Powers, Sibling Incest, Smoker Dean Winchester, first time (sorta)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-21
Updated: 2018-05-28
Packaged: 2019-04-25 15:57:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 40,903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14382018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pantykinksam/pseuds/pantykinksam
Summary: The demon's got plans for him, but Sam's got plans of his own - starting with fixing this unspoken thing between him and his brother. He'd also really like to put his father to rest.(Chapter titles insp. by Greta Van Fleet's From The Fires)





	1. Safari Song

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> They’re silent most of the ride up there until they're stopping at the top of a hill off the highway somewhere, behind the hills so the highway can’t see them. They go out there to scatter John’s ashes but it's stupid of Sam to think things would just end there.

The air is so fucking thin up here, and thinning further, and Sam has to breathe in little gasping bursts when he forgets to inhale deep enough. 

Nine-hundred-sixty-six miles from Sioux Falls and Sam’s been in the passenger seat for days now, no time for motels and no need for them where they’re going. Dean won’t slow down, hasn’t since they’d left Bobby’s. 

Sprinting past fields of yellow and sometimes green where shitty little shrubs sometimes make an appearance in the dryness of the desert sun but Sam isn’t looking out the window. He knows where they’re going, remembers the road well. 

Sometimes a landmark - a rock shaped like a camel’s head, a murder of crows flocking behind them like some kind of prophecy for evil, or maybe a funeral procession.

The green icebox in the corner of Sam’s eye is buckled into the backseat, their dad’s jacket wrapped around it and a fifth of bourbon left in John’s favorite flask that sits right beside it. 

There are ashes in that icebox but Sam can’t bring himself to cry. Sam can’t remember a time he’d ever cried on his dad’s behalf. 

Dean is silent in the front seat and they’re going on a hundred miles without a word between them. His jaw is locked, his eyes set on the streaked black of the road. Sometimes he’ll stop the car on the side of the road, throw himself out of the car and pound at the hood until his voice goes hoarse from screaming and Sam has to drag him into his chest by his elbows. 

Still, they don’t cry. 

A proper hunter burial was supposed to send John up in smoke. There was meant to be a ritual, some kind of system to his funeral that kept him dead, no loose ends. 

They always knew how it would really end. 

The car rolled its way up the mountains in 10 hours - almost half the amount of time it should’ve taken them to get to New Mexico. 

Flat, willowy tendrils of clouds and Sam can see the sky straight through them. He imagines the black smoke that’s supposed to be his dad winding its way up to become part of that same sky and he has to tear his eyes away. 

Dean’s hand on his knee jars him out of his own head. His lungs seize in his chest and contract with a jolt to remind Sam to take another breath, not enough oxygen, never enough. Dean is looking at him with this blackened kind of misery in his stare that bores right through Sam. Sam nods at him, once. 

He misses the smell of rain. 

There are smears of red under Sam’s eyes where the dust has worked its way under his eyelids and he flinches every time he catches his own reflection in the overhead mirror.

His nose is bleeding like a cracked-up hooker and his teeth stain red when he wipes his face across his sleeve before Dean can catch him doing it. It might be the dry heat but it might be something else entirely and it worries its way into Sam’s subconscious, self hatred in the form of the anxious throb in his chest every time his eyes seem a little too dark, his blood feels a little too hot in his veins. 

When Dean reaches for the bottle, going eighty-five miles an hour and accelerating, Sam won’t tell him not to drink and drive. If they go out like this, it only makes sense. The caked smears of browning blood across Dean’s fists on the wheel are enough of a reminder not to try shedding any wisdom. 

It’s instinct for Sam to go to roll down the window when sweat breaks out across his chest but Dean’s head snaps around and he barks at Sam to “roll that the fuck up”. It’s silent again after that.

They get to where they’re going within the hour. 

They tear across asphalt and then over dirt road and then through bare terrain when they run out of road altogether. They find a vacant plot of brush and Dean rolls the car right over it, swerves around and brakes against the dust. He’s panting but Sam can’t figure why. 

They’re a few hundred feet above Albuquerque, behind the hills a good enough ways that no one can see their car from the highway. The Impala rumbles as it shuts off and Dean pockets the keys and tumbles out onto the ground, vomits into the dirt. 

Sam sighs, kicks his way out into the setting sun and gives Dean his space on the other side of the car. He’ll let Sam ground him with a hand to the back of his neck in a little while, but not yet, not while he’s angry. 

A few days retreat, that’s all this is. Sam can take Dean and all his wrath, can bring him back down when he needs to. It was his rationale that was enough to coax Dean out here in the first place, get this done like any other job, but it isn’t anything like another job, not even close. 

Dean stands up and his eyes are bloodshot when they meet Sam’s from over the roof, his nose running down the curve of his lip. Sam licks his own, unconsciously. 

He gives his brother a sad smile and goes to unload the trunk. 

They’ve got three six-packs and a few stakes rolled up in a tarp to spread out camp for the night. Dean refuses to sleep in the car since John had flatlined, too much of his childhood under that roof to face just yet.

Sam lets his bag topple out and land at his feet and swings both sleeping bags over his back, grabbing Dean’s duffel and kicking the door shut with a muffled chocking sound. 

He sets up their makeshift tent beyond the car a ways and then goes for a run. 

The air’s too dry and his throat starts getting raw and running hot and he has to stop and gasp for breath more often than not. The wind’s knocked out of him within a few strides of a sprint and he crashes to his knees, choking. He holds his hands above his head and screams at the sky.

He walks back to the site after that, doesn’t say a word to Dean. The air is just shy of too cold to be wearing nothing more than a t-shirt now, the desert heat finally coming down from boiling. Sam can curl up into his sleeping bag now, ball his fists into his chest and punch at the solid ground until he’s wheezing but he still can’t cry. 

\---------

Sam wakes up to find his brother knocked back with one of the beer cartons, shoulders caved into the heat of the fire that Sam’s surprised to find he didn’t hear Dean start. 

His face is lit up with flecks of red and orange light bouncing off of his skin on one side and his mouth is turned down at the corners, cradling a beer with both palms tucked to his chest. 

Sam goes to sit beside him. Dean lets Sam rest his chin to his shoulder, their asses cushioned by the bulk of their duffels. He lies there staring at the open flame and his mouth tastes of copper, not iron, his throat so slick with dust and pent-up spit. 

They’d always known that out of the three of them left, John would be the first to die. Just never like this, never anything like this. The thought of it is enough to make Sam moan, and he throws his head back to the moon, downs the rest of Dean’s flask. 

Beside him, Dean still has to work on his breathing because Sam can feel the heavy hammer of his heart against the back of his ribcage. It grounds Sam, oddly enough, keeps him from running again. Sam squeezes his eyes shut, feels them burn in protest, sees light dance behind them from the fire, the starlight, the pain in his fucking chest, and Dean senses it, twists off the cap of a third bottle and draws it to Sam’s lips. 

They take turns tossing the beer back and forth between them, eyes glistening and rasping coughs that could be whimpers if they were the type to cry. 

It’s hours before either of them speak again and when they do, it’s Dean that picks up the conversation, voice hoarse from hours of quiet and from hollering itself weak. 

“Stanford,” Dean coughs, withered and hollow. 

Sam’s eyes snap open and his chin collides with his shoulder when he catches Dean’s eye from behind. 

The dull pain in his chest from college is still there, and it hits him at full force when it’s torn from Dean’s lips like this. He doesn’t breathe when he asks, “What?”

Dean’s quiet for long enough that Sam’s almost sure that he’s forgotten what he was going to say, or decided against it. He’s about to ask again when Dean sniffs, takes another swig and shifts his weight where the two of them connect at Dean’s shoulder and the base of Sam’s neck.

“Dad and I, we- we never stopped moving. After- back when…” he goes quiet, ducks his head and screws the foot of the bottle into the dirt.

Sam’s quiet, doesn’t want to push it, but he weaves his fingers up Dean’s leg, let’s them rest on his kneecap - as high as he dares to go, because his brother is fragile sometimes and it’s not worth testing. 

Dean hisses, a sharp whistle between his teeth. “God, we- we covered so much ground, looking for the demon. He- he uh, wouldn’t go any further west than this.”

Sam twists, swiveling on the bag so they are face-to-face. “He didn’t want you near California.” 

Dean laughs, the sound slammed from his chest. He smooths two fingers across his forehead, his eyebrows thinned and stretched across his skull, and shakes his head. “Made me promise.” 

“That you wouldn’t come visit.” 

“You- you walk out that door, Sammy, don’t you ever come back.” Dean mutters through gritted teeth, that familiar phrase sending bolts of guilt straight through Sam. 

Sam is half-prepared to reach out his free hand, the one not resting on Dean’s knee, and offer it to his brother to steady him, but he’s got a bad feeling. There’s a gnawing pain inside of him but he lets it eat at him and Dean finishes.

“I couldn’t- couldn’t if I wanted to.”

“I know, Dean.”

“He, God, he missed you so much.”

Sam swipes up the bottle and downs the rest. He won’t open his eyes. 

He feels Dean shift against the hand on his knee but doesn’t pull away. “He, I couldn’t say your fuckin’ name for six... goddamn months. It ate at him, Sam.”

Sam nods, his face hot against the flames. And really, what was he supposed to say to that? He was supposed to regret it, he knew, those years he spent waltzing through Stanford, pretending he knew what it was like to be on his own in good ol’ Santa Clara County, like he’d been an only child all his life, normal, sane, and anything but in love with his big brother. 

He searches, but he can’t find the guilt within himself. Instead, he keeps his mouth clamped tight. He can’t guess where Dean is going with this but he’s not about to ask, either. 

“Used to drink himself blind, calling out for you,” Dean drones on, “Calling for Mom too, sometimes.”

The sky is a singed purple with the night and there’s not enough pollution to poison the starry view. Sam finds himself staring, caught up in it all, and he lets out a shaky breath. 

He’s nodding before he realizes it. He lets Dean’s new information swirl past the alcohol in his system and infiltrate his conscious thoughts. 

“Know you two bit each other’s heads off…” Dean slurs, “But you gotta know he loved you.”

Sam bites his tongue. He focuses on the pulse in Dean’s kneecap under his fingertips and supposes that yeah, he does know that, probably always has. 

Though, there was that last third of his lifetime that Sam spent hating his father. John’s voice alone was always enough to set his seventeen-year-old blood to a broil, made his legs beg to kick up into a run and his voice shake with bristling, pent-up anger. 

He remembers a time when he had a retort waiting on the back of his tongue for every one of his dad’s own, always low blows and always just as ugly. He’d sprung the idea of college on John in one of the last arguments they’d ever had, before Sam left for law school. 

Since then, there’s been no duplicate to the look of pure devastation on his brother’s face than the one Sam caught filter through Dean’s eyes when he broke the news.

“I did, too, you know.”

Sam’s heart does this offbeat skipping thing inside his ribcage, and he has to stop himself from saying something incredibly stupid. Breathe, he’s got to remind himself to breathe. He tries an inhale, tries keeping it steady and inconspicuous so that it goes undetected. He fails. 

“I, um.” 

“Yeah, Dean. I know.”

Dean’s drunk, somehow. Sam had forgotten, until now, of all the booze his brother had forced into his system before they’d even arrived, and could only imagine how much more he’d downed while Sam was out running. He keeps mumbling under his breath but every time Sam tells him to speak up he just huffs, jerks his shoulders to shake him off. 

And now it’s just miserably awkward. Sam’s so restless. He’s hyper-aware of every spot where they connect, the parts of him that are touching Dean gone hot, pooling with blood. 

There’s a pain in his head that he hasn’t felt since his nose had fauceted with red a few miles back - hours - Sam corrected himself. It’s hard not to think of distance as a measure of time these days, all this time spent on the road. 

“And Jess,” Dean starts.  
It’s enough to startle Sam back to the present, his wide eyes fixed on Dean’s hands where they drum against a stick in the dirt. “Sorry, my fault, sorry, Sam.” 

It’s a small honor that Dean didn’t go the extra mile and call him Sammy, an apology for bringing up Sam’s girl like that. 

“But Jess, she- she was a good thing.” 

That familiar throbbing sensation creeps up on Sam at the mention of her name. His ears rush with a furious kind of discomfort and this is so not the kind of discussion he wants to be having with his brother over their father’s gravesite-to-be. 

His voice cracks when he tries to say, “Yeah, she was.” 

“You had it bad for her, didn’t you?”

“Guess I did.”

Dean nods. Sam coughs just to fill the silence. He should be freezing but there’s that flash of heat that keeps washing over him these days, always when he’s around Dean. He kicks his feet out just as his legs start to go numb, and tries not to think of the falling strands of burnt golden curls he’d felt against his face just before he’d opened his eyes to find his second love on the ceiling. 

He watches Dean lift his head up, his eyes gleaming in the harsh light of the flames that Sam won’t look at right now, can’t face. He’s fallen quiet, his mouth hung open just enough for Sam to catch an ivory glimpse of the first few of his teeth on the bottom row. 

Sam licks his lips and stares right back. 

“Wonder what that’s like. Havin’ someone you… someone you loved that much… snatched right out from under you like that.” 

That’s cold, even for Dean, because what he’d done by leaving Dean was nothing like the real thing at all. Sam shoves him, teeth working in a slow grind. He grunts, slams his elbow into Dean’s chest and rams him back against the earth. “What the fuck, Dean.” 

“Sorry,” Dean wheezes, clutches his stomach with his free hand. His eyes are half-lidded, screwed up in pain. “Sorry, I know, I know, m’drunk, I’m so drunk.” 

Sam forgives him, because he always does. He gives Dean a gnarled grin, jerks his chin up in invitation to come sit beside him again, one arm flailing in what’s probably supposed to look like a welcoming gesture, if Sam was less floored by the alcohol. “C’mere.”

Dean’s ribs are flat against Sam’s back when he settles back in, all knowledge of personal space foreign to him when he’s tipsy, but really always that way when it comes to Sam. He can feel his brother’s breath as it cools the drop of sweat making its way down the slope of Sam’s neck, just behind his ear and he does a good job of holding back his shudder.

Sam allows himself this small ounce of contact and leans back, that familiar thrum of Dean’s heartbeat he’s known all his life. He tries to remember a time when he could go so long without touching his brother. But Stanford was a different time, and there had been no other options, and once Sam had learned to accept that, he’d gotten along all right without Dean. 

He’d simply forgotten what it was like to love his brother, but since then, he’s remembered. 

There’s a rippling wind that tenses Dean right up against Sam’s spine and he buries his chin into the place where the crook of Sam’s neck meets the meat of his shoulder, and all is quiet. There’s almost an unsettling amount of stars in the sky, laid out in ripe bands of light, flickering and just-for-them. 

Sam wonders when they’re going to scatter John across the sand. 

“When you talked…” it takes Dean a minute to conjure up the rest. “About leaving, I always thought I’d be enough.”

“You were enough, Dean.”

“Not what I meant. Enough to…” 

Sam hears the choked-off sob Dean makes in the back of his mind, on repeat.

“Enough to make you stay. I always thought, you know, if I could make it easy enough for you, you’d be able to stick around for me. That you wouldn’t want to leave.” 

This sears going down, the muscles in Sam’s gut tightening with shame, and there’s a look on his face put there by the grief in Dean’s eyes but he can’t seem to make himself look away. He blinks dumbly at him in the dark, hands white and shaking. Dean’s lip curls up into something short of disgust and Sam hauls his eyes back down to the fire. 

Dean sits up straighter, tears himself from Sam’s side, who swallows and tries to keep his head down. 

“It was never about you, Dean.”  
Dean snorts, suddenly bold and coherent. “Yeah, you made that glaringly obvious when you left me for a pipe dream, little brother.”

It’s wearing down on Sam, a kind of sudden exhaustion from arguing with Dean that he can’t work his way out of. He doesn’t know what to say and it’s making him terribly high-strung and defensive. 

“You were right, Dean. I never was gonna get out.”

“Of this life?” Dean mocks, thumbing at the Zippo he’d pulled from his pocket. “Damn straight. You’re in it for life, kid, same as the rest of us.” 

“I know that, now.”

It’s a joint understanding between the two of them just then. Dean dares a sharp turn of his head to meet Sam’s eye, his mouth a straight line, unreadable. 

“You, you missed all of the shit, all of the most fucked up, awful shit I had to deal with, all on my own. So much fuckin’ evil out there, Sam, and you were- you were living it up with some chick on the West coast, and I- I was just supposed to keep on going, missing you like that.”

Sam’s first tear of the night balances on the highest ridge of his cheekbone, glistening, and he flicks it away in an angry swipe of disgust for himself. He’s not sure if he’d let himself live another day if something had happened to Dean out there on his own. 

“You- you weren’t with Dad?”

He knows the answer before Dean says, “Dad left me for a job three months into your first semester. Didn’t see him for a year and a half.” 

Sam nodded, some stubborn obstruction closing off his airway.  
“So… he’d been missing before?”

Dean twists the band around his finger and scowls. “Sammy, he’d been missing since you fuckin’ left, one way or another.”

Sam isn’t really sure what to do with news like besides to tip Dean’s chin towards the blackened sky and kiss him on the mouth. 

It’s slow, wound too tight and too tense and Dean’s rigid and unresponsive against Sam’s lips. It makes his stomach twist and he’s about to pull back and retch over his shoulder but then Dean’s hands tighten around his shoulders and he pulls him into his orbit and tucks his tongue behind Sam’s teeth and the chord around his heart fizzles out. 

“You fuckin’-” Dean tries to say but Sam slams his chest back against him and pulls his brother’s head in by the back of his neck. He’s got panicked hands everywhere he can reach, drawing Dean in and out, back and forth with every press of his lips and twist of his jaw, and he can’t get enough because he doesn’t know how long this is going to last. 

Dean’s back is curved in a pretty half-moon dip under Sam’s hand and it’s enough to force a trembling moan from Sam’s core, and Sam’s reminded of the first time, so fucking long ago.

There’s their dead dad right across the tire tracks and there’s evil everywhere but here and it’s supposed to be over for them, has been for a good few years, and when Sam pulls away, he’s gasping, hips still rocking. 

“Sam, what’re-” 

And suddenly Sam doesn’t want to think about it anymore. He sucks in great gushes of oxygen but he can’t regulate his heartbeat, his head feeling airy and stunned like he’s minutes after waking up from the best sleep of his life. He’s gasping still, heaves of breaths that rock him in and out of focus, and all it takes is Dean’s sweaty palm on the side of his neck to steady him again. 

And they are so bad at this part, always have been, but Dean rests his forehead to Sam’s collarbone and presses his lips to the bone, rolls his head back and forth across Sam’s chest because, he says, sounding absolutely wrecked, “It’s okay, Sam. God, we’re so completely fucked in the head, but it’s okay, gonna be okay.”

Sam lets his chest puff out in one last, desperate quest for air.  
That’s all he’s ever really wanted from his brother. He nods, steady pull of Dean’s gravity levying him closer. Dean’s probably wrong about that one (since when are they ever okay) but it’s worth letting his brother believe it while he will. This, he thinks, is going to be really fucking awkward in the morning. 

Dean dives a hot hand down Sam’s pants and squeezes, wrenching a guttural grown from his brother, like he knows what he’s thinking, then rocks his hand in time with their heaving chests. “It will be, Sam, you’ll see.”

Dean’s drunk, so he can’t really believe what he’s saying, but maybe they need this, deserve it even, so Sam filters out the smothering apology working its way through his system and reaches to pull Dean’s head between his legs. 

He tips his eyes to the skyline and lets his mouth fall open and mouths his brother’s name like benediction.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Do you remember what I said when I got down on my knees?  
> Gotta get your lovin' baby, your lovin's all I need  
> Don't make me beg now baby, don't make me bleed  
> I gave you all a man could give and you still walked out on me
> 
> -GVF


	2. Edge of Darkness

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Or, "Freaking Out on the Interstate"  
> Dean can't handle the mess he's made of it all.

Sam sleeps late into the afternoon and when he wakes up Dean’s not there. Neither is the car. It really shouldn’t, but it shocks Sam stock-still and shaky. 

The air has gotten to him again - those shallow sleep-breaths he's been used to not offering nearly enough oxygen. He has to wrench open his lung capacity and swallow twice as much air to compensate, his head swimming already, minutes since sleep. 

There’s a dam that breaks free of Sam and he drags his head back against the blanket he’d pillowed under him, screws his face tight, and sobs himself dry. There is a phantom hand on his shoulder because Sam can’t help but think of Dean, never can. Sam flings himself out of his sleeping bag and drags his arms across the desert floor, moaning. He thinks, faintly, he might be sick. 

Dean is who the hell knows where and Sam should have fucking known. 

Experience tells Sam to get up, to walk - to run away, turn heel and just get the hell out of there. There are muted memories of the first time Sam ran away from Dean, and from what little he remembers, Sam is pretty sure he can vouch for it not being worth the belt on his back when he’d come back. 

The first time, Dean had snuck their dad’s shears into bed with him in the middle of the night and snipped off a chunk of Sam’s hair in his sleep, some kind of newfound rivalry between the two of them. Sam hadn’t found out until John’s eyes went wide at breakfast mid-morning. His hands, on instinct, felt up the back of his skull when John brought his hand up to his own in shock, eyes swollen and wide.

It was enough for Sam to run in the opposite direction, John bellowing through his own laughter at him to get the fuck back there if he wanted a place to sleep that night.

Dean found him four days later curled up on a bus-stop bench, a hundred miles out of town. He’d dragged him back to the car, shoved him into the backseat and drove him back to their cabin without a word. 

His brother wouldn’t look at him all the way there, worried of some kind of betrayal in his face that might give away to Sam any guilt in his eyes that might be used as leverage. But Sam remembers the look on Dean’s face after John beat his youngest for the trouble. 

His brother had been awake for days before he had found Sam - black patches of sleeplessness under both eyes enough proof for Sam of that. Dean would flinch every time John issued Sam another ten laps, another three hours out on the range, the first stakeout of the night for all the shit he’d somehow brought down on them for going AWOL. 

Sam got his favorite green hoodie out of the ordeal. It was an ugly old thing, distressed enough around the edges for Sam to know it was a Salvation Army steal, but it zipped up alright and it was long enough at the sleeves to hide Sam’s freakishly long arms inside. It was a pity-buy from Dean that was supposed to make up for the bald spot: something Sam could cover up his jagged new haircut with and a topic of discussion that Dean swore he’d never bring up again. He’d punched Dean square in the face for that, but Dean had more or less let him.

That had been the last prank war for years to come.

Sam knew the guilt on his brother’s face and saw it for what it was and after that, until Stanford, he didn’t try leaving again.  
______

Somewhere, far in the opposite direction, a coyote wails, and then there’s nothing but white noise again. 

Dean rolls back through with the windows rolled down and Poison screaming through the loudspeakers like it’s all a big game to him. Sam books it in the other direction, not ready to face him any fucking time soon. 

Dean’s voice cuts through the bass guitar and tells him to get the fuck over here, that they’ve got somewhere to be. He’s ducking in and out of the pre-drawn lines in the sand tires made on the way out, weaving and swerving like he just couldn’t give a damn, and Sam’s mouth is a hollow ‘o’ in disbelief at his brother’s absolute stupidity. Some hangover, he assumes. 

Sam asks where the fuck he’s been when the car pulls up to his heels, his voice fragile but calculated. 

“Dude,” Dean sneers, one cocked eyebrow peeking up from behind his shades. “Remind me to beat that buzzkill out of you.” 

Sam watches him bobbing his head and swaying on his feet with this awe-filled, black look on his face like he’d kick Dean’s teeth in if he could.  
“You’re drunk. Again. Jesus, Dean-” He takes some time to assess his brother, his fists clenched in his pockets. He can just make out the Jack Daniels label showing through the faint white plastic of the bag that dangles from Dean’s left hand. 

“Uh, yeah,” Dean slurs, a stupid smirk smeared across his sloppy mouth. “I know.” 

Every Rose Has Its Thorn is still blaring in the background and Sam wants to slash the fucking tires, still slightly breathless and cooking in his massive coat. So this is how it’s going to be. 

“So? You gonna tell me?”

“Tell you?”

“Where you’ve been for Christ knows-”

Dean tosses up his hands in a lazy arc, the momentum of it veering him off to the side. His muscles are sagging and weary. He tries to recover by leaning against the hood, and when Sam goes to snatch the bag from his grip, he dives for Sam’s gut with a hooked fist. 

“Lay off, Sam,” he grunts, and Sam catches the scent of stale chips on his boozy lips. “Relax. I didn’t do it.”

Sam grows cold. That sinking feeling returns, and he’s blindsided by it for more than a second. “Didn’t do what, Dean?” He doesn’t want to guess, but he probably already knows.

“I was gonna. I was, you know. Gonna take care of Dad so- so you wouldn’t have to be there.”

Sam gnashes his teeth, grinds his boot into the ground and can’t take the daggers in his eyes off of Dean. This is so like Dean, so fucking like his brother to do something so incredibly selfish on a whim, or just to make Sam hurt. 

“Dean… What did you do?”

“I said I didn’t, Sammy, Christ!”

The corruptness inside of Sam that he keeps so expertly buried is working itself out of him in small spurts of anger and Sam has to drive his nails into the coarse skin of his palms to keep from lunging at his brother. His fury is smothering. 

It’s the night before, Sam thinks. It’s done something to them again and this time they can’t get it back. This time, Dean’s really cracked. He supposes maybe he should make a run for it because this exposed fissure in Dean’s vulnerability is dangerous, always has been. But he can’t bring himself to do it, staring at the crooked smirk on his brother’s face, so he just scoffs.

“What didn’t you do, Dean?”

“Didn’t spread his fuckin’ ashes, what the fuck else.”

The lines across Sam’s forehead smooth themselves out as he forces an exhale from his lungs. Relief. There’s the icebox, right behind Dean’s seat and tucked in just like they’d done it before. Dean is staring back at him, watching his jaw grind as he thinks, that stubborn stare that tells Sam that Dean knows exactly what he’s doing.

“F’you did,” Sam says, his voice a steady monotone, “It wouldn’t be enough.” To make me leave, Sam thinks but doesn't say. He’s trying to make me angry enough to high tail it out of here so he doesn’t have to face me about it. 

Dean doesn’t acknowledge the edge to Sam’s words. 

“Are you fuckin’ ready to go or not?” It’s sharp, a biting tone Sam hasn’t heard in a while and it snaps him back. He looks around the site, slinging his bag over his shoulder. The wind has died with the night and it’s an absurd temperature once again, Sam’s hair slicking up the back of his neck with sweat.

“And leave all this shit behind?”

“We’ll be back.” 

Sam wants to argue against it, wants to bring up coyotes and the environmental agency, because maybe all their shit will be ransacked by that time, but he’s got all he needs in the bag on his back plus his brother right there in front of him, an offering, and so he tries not to look back at the tarp flapping in the dust as they drive towards wherever the road starts up again. 

The shotgun seat is cool underneath him as they reel towards the sun. There’s nothing but silence between them, nothing. Sam soaks in white noise for a while and sometimes he’ll turn to see if Dean is looking back but not today, Dean’s eyes perpetually stuck to the road ahead. 

“Dean-”

“Lemme have some quiet, Sammy.” 

Dean’s tone is so sure, so stubborn and harsh that for a second Sam doesn’t even dare to swallow, scared he’ll betray himself and look nervous.

So, they’re not going to talk about it. Dean is going to play it the way he always does and deny it for a little while until he gets drunk one night and tries to feel Sam up or something. 

Resigned to that fact, Sam falls back against the leather cushion with a huff, heavy locks of frizzy hair hanging low over his nose. “Just wanna know where we’re headed.”

Dean grunts. “Taos.” 

“Taos? That’s like… seventy miles from here.”

Dean’s eye meets Sam’s from each of their peripherals, hot and daring. “Oh, s’that too much for you or somethin’?”

Sam’s cheeks spike with red and he ducks his head low to rest his chin against his clavicle. He’s wound tight all of a sudden, on watch and protective over his own ego. “No, just wanna know what’s so important in Taos that has us leaving camp so goddamn soon.”

Dean draws in a breath. Sam keeps his hands in his lap but his toes are darting up and down inside the caged toe of his boots and he’s trying not to worsen the tension.

“There’s a tavern along the way. Supposed to be really cool. Got some spiked root beer I thought we should try.” 

Sam allows his eyebrow to raise up halfway in disbelief. “A tavern?”

There’s disappointment laced in there somewhere, but if Dean notices it goes unspoken. He nods at Sam like it’s obvious, like they go seventy miles out of their way for root beer all the time. “Yeah, Sam. Any objection?”

It’s enough to make Sam want to tear his fingers through his hair. His head falls against the window with a hollow thunk, hot tears in his eyes. A thick band of yellow afternoon sun makes its way across the span of his face and he ducks into the shadows to hide his shame, pushed back against the corner and speechless.

Dean must take his silence as acceptance because there’s no slowing down, whirring past fields and all of their putrid yellow plots of drying grass and skinny, wild horses. Sam’s ears pop every fifteen miles or so from the altitude but still the car keeps climbing, and the sun is crushing right up against the windshield now, dangerously blinding. 

“Seriously, Dean,” Sam goes to say, but Dean turns the dial all the way to the right and an old cassette exceeds all natural volume; the car has erupted with bass guitar. What’s your problem, Sam wants to say. He wants to ask Dean what’s keeping them from talking about it, why they’ve always got to look a gift horse in the mouth like this instead of just saying fuck it and letting a good thing run its course. He knows, God he knows, if Dean would just let him touch him… 

He watches black patches of light trails dance behind his blacker eyelids instead, and keeps them closed when he tells Dean to,

“Pull over.”

Dean does no such thing and forty miles down the same road he’s tailspinning, street signs and billboards passing by in a blur of digits and Sam’s hair flicks in his eyes in a million whipping strands by the hot air. 

They’re still going with no signs of stopping, a sign for Madrid reading 20 mi ahead or maybe 30 or 50, Sam can’t guess the first digit. It’s ten degrees hotter wherever they are, the desert mountains opening up in a canyon of a one-billion-years-empty dune that might once have been the bottom of an ocean. The sun sits right on top of them and bakes Sam’s nose through the windshield, persistent, Sam’s only constant right now besides his drunken brother.

Who, by the way, should really not be behind the wheel right now. There’s this horribly vacant twist to Dean’s mouth and Sam wouldn’t be surprised if his brother flung them off the ledge of the road right here and now, the tightness in his own chest growing more insistent with every measure of silence that goes by between them. 

He doesn’t know why he agreed to this, wants out of this car so goddamn desperately. 

Dean is hardly keeping his eyes open beside him and so that’s when Sam takes the wheel, cuts them all the way to the right and away from the edge, no left hand lane to save them from plunging over the canyon. The car swerves and skids and slams Sam hard up against the window, and he wrecks his wrist pretty bad. He’s vaguely terrified of himself right then because he can’t figure out what made him do it but they’re there, off the road, and Dean’s mouth is hung open and he sounds like he’s choking, scrabbling for words. 

Nearly half a second goes by during which Sam thinks in some bout of hopeless innocence that Dean is going to be stunned long enough to let Sam talk after something like that. 

“Dean-”

“Get. Out.”

“What? You- What?”

“Out, Sam!” Dean’s voice is bordering on roaring but Sam can’t hear him anyway, not through the roaring anger in his ears. 

He’s fifty miles out of his way and they haven’t passed another set of headlights for a good half of the trip, but Sam does. He topples out of the car and doesn’t let his head up until Dean’s speeding too far ahead to see the wet streaks down his face. 

Sam shudders in pain and spits against the rocks, clings to the badly bruising, purple wrist, already swollen to twice its size. He makes his way away from the road and into the shade, lungs already filled with dust and aching in their cage and he thinks to himself, this really isn’t how this trip is supposed to go.  
___________  
Somewhere within the hour, Dean comes back for Sam like he always does. 

Sam’s not where Dean left him but it doesn’t seem to matter because he sniffs Sam out anyway, finds him lying in the sand a half a mile off the roadside with his lips white and his scalp soaked through with sweat. 

He doesn’t offer Sam a hand. He stares down at him and Sam imagines Dean pulling him up by his shoulders and drawing his mouth up into another kiss. 

“You done bein’ a little bitch?” Dean says alternatively. 

Sam flips him off with his good arm and pulls himself to his knees, hoists himself the rest of the way up with what’s left of his strength.

“You know what fuck you.” He says it all at once, no breath between the words and Sam’s starting to worry it sounds like he’d practiced that. 

Dean winces though, and it’s enough for Sam, pride pooling in his belly because it means he’s done something to his brother.

“S’that a no?” Dean raps, throat moving up and down. He turns around to face the sun and Sam’s heart gets ready to stop because Dean wouldn’t really leave him here, never for long enough to really make him pay, but Dean just holds one hand up to his eyes and looks towards the road. 

Sam’s eyes flash a dark black with anger but he keeps his guard up, stomps towards the car and rubs his lame wrist.  
_____________

“You gonna let me see it?”

“What?”

Dean rolls his eyes and goes for Sam, chest to Sam’s torso with his seatbelt stretched to all hell. Sam’s stomach clenches around nothing for a second and he thinks this is probably it but then Dean is wrenching his locked seatbelt off with a curse and holding Sam’s stupid fucking wrist and hot shame burns through him for thinking this is anything more than it is. 

It’s like Dean gets the notion because he squints up at him a moment and then seizes himself back behind the wheel, the car in park.

“Just a sprain. S’what you get anyway, being such a stupid fuckin’ punk like that. Serves you right. Wanna take somethin’?”

And that’s supposed to be Sam’s cue to shake it off, to tell Dean he’s fine with a smile. This bar in front of them is supposed to cure the drought between them with a couple of root beers and the offer to let Sam drive on the way back. For some reason Sam’s just not having it this time and so he waves his hand away, tells Dean he’s going to wait in the car and why doesn’t he just stop in and pick up dinner for the night. 

Dean’s not hurt by this, but it means something to him, something that Sam can’t quite place. He picks it up by the look in his brother’s eyes when Dean tucks his lips between his teeth and shuts Sam in with the keys. 

In the back of his mind, there’s still that ruthless part of Sam that keeps telling him Dean will come back and spit out an apology and they’ll pick up where they left off. Years of experience have taught him otherwise though, and Sam knows when to trust his gut about these things.  
________________

The water in the bathroom reeks like sulfur, this hanging odor just under Dean’s nose that shocks the hair straight up on his arms. 

It’s not demons. He has to tell himself that until he believes it, scrubbing down the first layer of dust on his face with his fingertips and the icy, ruddy water. He has to retrain himself to take another breath every so often as it is, this high altitude still wearing him down, but it’s a new level of autonomy when he has to force open his airway to let it in when the cold water shuts it down.

He’s hunched over and honed in on the laces of his boots, something to focus on outside of the humming in his head. It panics him a little bit that things are bad enough between him and Sam that the kid wouldn’t even come in and drink it off, but he thinks solemnly, you did this to yourself, this one is on you. 

He wrenches his shoulders back and holds himself tin-soldier tall, a faulty kind of growl forming in his throat that he couldn’t even back up with a look to match, his masculinity dented and diminishing.  
“Awful shit mess you’ve gotten yourself into, Dean,” he hisses at his reflection, and it sounds so much like his father it sends his jaw slamming shut. He pauses, wraps thick fingers around the basin, stretched, white knuckles trembling. 

He can’t fathom how the two of them got so distracted from their original mission out here in the mountains but it scares him like a stake through his sternum. He’s wanted his baby brother all his life but each time Dean gets Sam where he wants him, he doesn’t know what the fuck to do with it all. 

His eyes start blinking frantically, salty sting that has him sucking in a gasp and he has to clap a hand to his jaw to keep from blubbering. He thinks it’s funny, but he’s probably never hated himself more than now. 

Dean thinks back to his brother’s jagged, bent wrist propped up against the door, that nasty gnashing look across his face, and would give anything to know what the fuck he’s feeling right about now. 

He mostly wants to book it out of there and take Sam home to ravish him, but it’s totally impractical when he’s fucked up this bad and anyway, it’s not how they do things. 

He’s lost all of a sudden, that ringing sound in the back of his skull just asking for a couple of shots and some fries for the road. He’s got God knows how much longer before Sam decides he’s going to stop being so fuckin’ mad at him and so maybe he should go out with a bang, take back a pretty little miss in fuck-me pumps and shut Sam out, cold turkey like just before college. 

Dean doesn’t, though, can’t. It’d all be for nothing then, and then what.  
_________

There’s a rapping at the window. Sam doesn’t open his eyes, fixed shut in a last-ditch effort to keep Dean out. He holds entirely immobile, static of his heartbeat matching his shallow breathing, stiff like roadkill.

“Open up, Sammy.” 

So, Dean knows he’s awake. Sam lets his mouth twitch and he revs the crank, the window rolling down. He can feel Dean’s eyes on him but he won’t face him. A hand darts out and grabs the keys from Sam’s lap and snatches them back through. Sam hears him clear his throat, scratch at the fabric of his undershirt. 

Sam’s afraid that the look in Dean’s eyes is going to make his heart hurt, so he saves himself the trouble and knocks his knees up to his chest. Nothing is to be said between the two of them, but Dean goes for it anyway.

“Time to go back, little brother”, Dean murmurs, an awkward jam against his vocal cords and Sam wants to wrap his arms around his brother and beg, and he’s dangerously close to doing so. 

He makes room in the front seat for his brother and he could laugh, really, he could but he swats the keys away when Dean hesitates, holding them up in offering. So fucking predictable. It’s so not even close to fair that Sam’s always caught up in playing along to this senseless, endless game.

“Not tonight, Dean.”

Dean nods, a reckless sorry feeling making his perception foggy.  
He still has a lot on his mind. He’d like to get back to camp. 

There’s no music on the way home, and sometimes Sam exhales a little louder than he needs to just to see if it sparks conversation, but Dean’s not talking, just driving with his wrist to the wheel and one arm dangling loosely in the open air, wind whipping up the Impala’s very own sand storm with the dirt in the floor. Dean’s hair is a misshapen mass of mess and Sam doesn’t smile even though he’s close. 

He could just have this, Sam considers, if this were all Dean had to give. It could be enough, if it had to be, just the two of them on the road and nothing else. 

They drive past a sacred burial place, several dozen crucifixes all in perfect rows against the sooty landscape as they push forward, still thirty minutes from their site. They look out-of-place out here, stark contrast of white in the early evening. Sam watches them pass through the rearview until his eyes itch in protest, their lashes sticking to the tops of their lids with tacky sweat. He wishes something wonderful would happen. 

And then Dean pulls over this time, a rough yank to the breakdown lane.

“Dean?” Sam asks dumbly, the first and last word ever running through his train of thought. 

“Gonna miss the sunset, Sammy.”

Sam’s chest releases itself and lets out a rush of air. He knows not to let this pass.

Dean is making his way around the back of the car as Sam swings his door open and the wind catches him off guard, rolling and violent. He sets one foot to the dirt and then the other, swivels around to expect to find his brother against the skyline, to see him stretching for the sun, but instead. Instead. 

There’s a hand on the back of Sam’s neck and then teeth to his jaw, hot breath to his cheek, and Sam opens up to his brother’s touch like he’s asking for it, throws his head back and lets Dean kiss him. 

His shoulder digs into the black of the roof and it’s a slow, savage burn but Sam can’t pull away. His pant legs are caught against his shins with the blunt push of the wind and Dean keeps him pinned that way, the heavy pull of his mouth anchoring Sam to the metal. 

The edges of Sam’s mind have gone fuzzy. He slides his tongue across Dean’s teeth and crooks his fingers under his chin, slack with need. Dean’s hands wind in his shirt, fisting in grey cotton, and Sam can tell they’re freezing through the fabric.

Sam doesn’t want to test it, doesn’t want to screw this up. He’s got his bad arm tucked around the door handle and he wants to touch Dean so badly but if it’s too much that’s it and so one hand with have to do, pressed iron-hot underneath Dean’s shirt and jumping up with Dean’s chest with every stutter of breath. 

Orange light in Sam’s eyes and he has to screw them shut and isn’t that just the injustice of it all, the one time he wants to take all of this in. Dean’s tongue is in his mouth, thick and heavy from the alcohol, but altogether Dean and it’s so sweet Sam groans against him, his lungs feeling enormous again, finally. 

The hands against Sam’s jacket tighten and he blinks, finds Dean pulling away to stare at him, his shadow cast across Sam’s face so he doesn’t have to squint anymore. He’s saying something, but Sam can’t quite make it out. 

“Huh?”

“I’m- I’m just sorry.” 

“You-you’re what?”

Dean hisses, pulls Sam back in to nip at his mouth. 

“Just - forget it, okay?”

It’s not worth asking about which part Dean means by that. 

“Right, sure,” Sam smiles, heated cheeks against Dean’s neck when he ducks down to dart his tongue out and taste him. “Whatever.” 

“I- I’m pretty fucked up about this, and - Can we just not-?”

Sam splays his hand out across Dean’s hip and chuckles, shakes his shaggy hair in Dean’s faces and it catches on his brother’s cracked lip. “Don’t wanna talk about it?”

“Right, yeah.”

Sam kisses him again. It’s too good not to. 

“Whatever you fuckin’ want, Dean,” he gasps, and then giant waves of Dean are splashing over him again, all restless hands and wandering mouth, and Sam thinks, God, please, let this last. And in one last, fleeting thought before it all fizzles out against Dean's lips, Sam thinks that this where he's been meant to be, all that time wasted.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Every day's a new day  
> Every way's a new way  
> On the edge of darkness  
> Finding out what it means to love  
> And to think we've found the time


	3. Flower Power

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean sleeps easier these days, knowing Sam does to.  
> It's so much simpler to be happier this way, he's decided. And who is he to stand in the way of what Sam wants?

Dean lets the headlights die out across the pavement, the asphalt thick like it’s still drying when he slows to a stop at a no-name motel, thirty miles out of their way. It’s got a nice view, Dean could give it that. No trees for miles but a wooden porch shared between every two rooms, its wooden yellow exterior rotting and clinging to any hint of water for moisture.Dean makes a point to ask for a room just out front so he can look at the mountains - nothing he hasn’t seen before, but a fresher view than the twin-size and the television box he’s been used to all his life. 

He squints at the front lobby, tries to see if he can make out who’s sitting at the front desk because it matters. He can usually talk a woman down to letting them stay for twenty bucks cheaper a night but a man, Dean has had to go the extra mile to get a man to give him what he wants before, a totally different story. It’s impossible to see in the glare of the windows and he’s too far away, anyway. He grunts, cracking his neck and then his knuckles, restless.

This sickening dread Dean feels weighing down on him makes him wonder if him and Sam are just distracting themselves from what they’ve come out here to do. 

The icebox glints in the morning light behind Dean, and he turns to look at it, a deep rumbling sigh rolling through him. One short pat to its lid and then he swings his arm back around, takes his keys out of the ignition. 

The sun is still tucked safely above the clouds, rays of pink bouncing off of them from where it keeps itself hidden, and they won’t see it for a couple of hours once it peers over the mountain range. Dean’s grateful for that because it means he still has some time to think before he imagines he’s supposed to wake up his brother.

Sam’s asleep beside him - under him - he has to correct himself, thick, ratty hair that tumbles over Dean’s lap where Sam lies across it, wet cheek stuck to the exposed skin below Dean’s shorts. He groans. 

“You fuckin’ comfortable, kid? Jesus.”

But Dean doesn’t move, keeps his legs relaxed just where they are because Sam looks happy and if this is all it takes…

He pauses, looks back down, something catching his eye under the nape of Sam’s collar. It’s small enough to look like a birthmark, but too dark - has to be ink.

Dean’s heart stumbles in its rhythm because when the fuck did his brother get a tattoo, and his hands are shaking when he reaches up to pull away the shirt fabric, get a better look. 

There, just before Sam’s ear becomes his jaw, two letters, black, unmistakable. 

D.W. in plain script. 

Dean has to brace himself against the window with his elbow smeared against the glass, this clutching ache in his ribs. His face is burning, his lips stretched tight around his teeth. Has it actually been that long since he’s let himself really look at his brother? 

He digs his nails into the leather interior and pries open the door, wriggles his thighs out from under Sam’s head, careful, watching the slightest break in Sam’s breathing. His brother doesn’t stir, though. Kid sleeps like he doesn’t ever intend to wake back up again, Dean thinks fondly. 

The air gets constrictive again and Dean makes a surging break for the front desk, panting. He can’t let himself think about any of it just yet.   
________

Lorraine, the front desk lady calls herself. 

She sells her own turquoise and gave Dean her business card when he spent a little too long at her display on the way in. 

“Ma’am,” he’d smiled, tipping his hat her way. 

She’d just beamed at that, her gummy mouth jutting out in a toothless smile, long braid swinging with her hips as she made her way over to him. Her broad gut hung over the table so far Dean had worried she’d tip over half the display and he’d have to stoop to pick them up for her. She was nice enough, if a little unfamiliar to Dean during their interaction. 

“My guess is you’re here for more than my stones, though, huh, boy?” She’d laughed, that big belly shaking.

Dean had ducked his head, that sly smile he’s gotten so good at over the years that’s supposed to tow the line somewhere between bashful and cunning. 

“You’d be correct. And damn,” he’d whistled, shrillest sound between his teeth, “If you don’t mind me saying, it’s a mighty fine little piece of heaven you’ve got up here.”

He doesn’t know why he’d laid on that thick southern accent he falls into around all the sweet old ladies, like they let him off easier if he’s a good little Texan boy. Sam would give him shit for it, though, he knows. It works, sometimes, but probably wouldn’t have made a difference to the ancient Navajo woman that couldn’t care less what kind of white he was. 

She’s more than accommodating, though, offers Dean and his kid brother a little spot on the side with a “master bath” that doesn’t live up to half its name in size and a quaint little view of as far out into the acres they can see from the porch. He can’t manage to get much off the price - business is scarce, you know how it is, Lorraine had said - but they can swing it for the night. 

It’s a respectable enough plot of land and Dean accepts it gratefully, feeds her this fetching smile and shakes her hand tight. He remembers well enough to breathe so his shoulders don’t ride up and make him look as tense as he is, all hyperactive brain and wracked nerves from so much time spent behind the wheel. 

Back outside, Dean checks into the room wordlessly, his mouth a thin line and his dad’s old cap pulled tight over his brow, entirely unrecognizable out here as it is, but just to be sure. His throat is so fucking dry, his tongue tacky and stuck to the roof of his mouth. His hands are shaking when he goes to fit the key to the lock, knees wobbly and he could really use a drink.

It’s made worse by the fact that Sam is so fucking oblivious to it all, no idea that Dean knows, is so suddenly, overwhelmingly, irreversibly aware of his initials brandished on his skin. 

He slips the keyring into his back pocket and goes straight for the pack of smokes in his front one, kicking open the door as he flicks open his lighter. His pulse is uncontrollable in his temple and he should probably sit down for a minute before he can go back to pretending nothing’s transpired but he can tell by the quake in his walk that it’s going to take longer than it sometimes can. 

Dean wishes for the road again, his favorite place, wants to make some dumb excuse to go into town and drive awhile, but it’ll have to wait because Sam’s still asleep out there and he can’t deal with him yet. He takes the bed by the door instead, an old ritual that comes along with the whole “watch out for Sammy” ordeal: always have eyes on the exit before the enemy has eyes on you. 

The singular duffel he brought in with him goes kicked under the bed frame, heavy and dense on his back and utterly pointless to be carrying until he decides on cleaning the knives again. He swipes the hat off of his head, catching himself in the mirror and feeling ridiculous almost instantly. No one here to recognize them, anyway, he reminds himself, doesn’t want to deal with the pity party that comes with people asking about his dad, not that they know too many hunters in New Mexico this time of year.

There’s a small bathroom in the corner of the room with the door wide open to reveal nothing much else besides the standard pearly sink and two faded grey towels because at least Lorraine was smart enough to pick a color scheme that doesn’t involve white like some of their shittiest stays had mistaken for a good idea. It’s substandard but Sam will find it to his liking, this scenery right up his alley, in the middle of nowhere and everything.

He’s afforded a moment of pride when he thinks of the way Sam will look out onto their view like they’ve got the whole world in their hands, some droughted patch of sagebrush far enough off the highway to trick his little brother into thinking they’re way out west. It dissipates remarkably quicker than Dean could’ve guessed, that flinching look on his face back when he thinks of all he doesn’t know about his brother and in turn the two of them together, since Sam had left for California. He can’t afford to think about it now, anyway. He’ll let it eat at him for a little while and then maybe Sam will say something stupid and he can start up a fight and Dean will bring it up then. 

The No Smoking sign on the porch stands utterly useless beside Dean in the rocking chair when he makes his way outside, his feet kicked up on the woodwork, back aching from the right angle he’s been squeezed into all afternoon. He twirls the cigarette between two fingers and worries his lip with his canine as he exhales, soft swirl of smoke curling up into the air, already too scarce as it is but Dean needs the calm so he takes another puff.

He’s out there for maybe ten minutes before Sam’s frizzy shock of hair pops up over the dashboard, his hands scratching at his eyes in balled-up little fists, the big friggin’ baby. Dean watches him wipe at his mouth with his shirt sleeve through the window, shaking his head at him. It feels light without the cap, thin line of flattened hair where the band had tightened around it. 

Fucking adorable, his brother, even at twenty-two. Twenty-three, Dean corrects himself, so much time gone already. 

He sees Sam sit to full height and his shoulders fill out half the car, big broad thing that he is, and the way he stretches with his entire body. 

Rough as it’s been between the two of them, six weeks since their father died and they’re just now getting around to handling it - and Dean is handling it, no matter what Sam thinks of it - Dean’s sure he’ll always have that first thirty minutes with Sam when his brother first wakes up. 

Never fails, Sam wakes up quiet, compliant. No matter what Dean does or think, Sam lets him do it. Sleep does something to Sam, makes him easy and submissive in a way that Dean has never understood. Dean doesn’t have his own little happy hour like that, he’s the same all the time. Sometimes he wonders how Sam has stuck around through it all, and then remembers with a sickening grimace, he hasn’t. 

They make eyes from across the field, through the parking lot and Sam’s eyes are scanning until he scopes his brother out. Dean waits for Sam’s shoulders to relax, that constant reassurance they get wrapped up in when they realize the other’s still there, but Sam just fucking grins at him, drags his tongue along his bottom lip and Dean realizes what he’s doing right away, groaning loud and long and overly drawn-out. 

It’s looks like those that make Dean wonder why he’s been holding back for so long. 

He’s startled to feel his brow raising, a stark laugh punched from him. He thrusts his cigarette into the sky and waves emphatically at Sam from the front porch, gestures with one arm for him to get his ass up here. 

Sam’s torso shakes up and down in a rocky sniggering motion, is mouth caught up in a wide smirk. The door swings open seconds later and miles of legs pile out of the car, endless stretches of Sam and Dean still can’t believe he’s this much taller than him now. 

Dean can play pretend, is usually good at acting ordinary around Sam, so long as it’s at a time where Sam shouldn’t expect anything else. Not like last night. Dean beams, features bright and wide for his brother and he offers Sam a seat beside him, tells him 

“Nice, huh? Thought we could use a day off before heading back to the Hill of the -”

He’s cut off from saying “Martyrs” by the way Sam says “goddamn” under his breath in that old hunter way of his, head dipped low as he shakes it back and forth, instigating him. Dean doesn’t know what to expect after that but it’s not what happens next, the stabbing hook of Sam’s finger around his hoodie drawstrings, pulls Dean to his feet and smacks his lips over his brother’s mouth, cuts Dean’s air straight off. 

Dean makes a little squeak of protest and reaches up to pull Sam back by the face but Sam’s hands find the just of his hipbone and squeeze as he kisses him and Dean hums, slides his hands back up to spread map-wide across Sam’s cheeks, just stroking. 

It’s nice, kissing his brother, and Dean falls into an old rhythm, the press of it simultaneously lulling him and spurring him on. 

“I don’t care when we get back, Dean,” Sam says, finally. “Just didn’t know if you were gonna call it quits again, try to leave me out here for a while or somethin’.”

Dean blows hot air across Sam’s face, closes his eyes at that sharp jab of passive aggression that Sam’s always been an expert at. 

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he says, proud of that answer, and scuffs his nails across Sam’s throat, reveling in the fact that he just gets to touch him again. 

Sam scoffs and looks towards the sun, squints at a lone hawk dancing high above them, follows its thin, dark shadow to the dormant earth. The sky is calm and crisped blue, deep and empty and boundless. The car gleams brilliant and bright in the light of it all and Dean is warm all over with love for it all. 

“I-I know there’s still daylight, but-”

The words catch in Dean’s throat, something about the way Sam’s looking at him catching him off-guard. His skin feels too big for his skeleton, fake and slippy. 

“I don’t know.” 

Dean sees Sam’s mouth spreads into a sneer, whole face lit up and still so sleep-puffy. His stomach growls under Dean’s hands and he jumps, and he wonders when was the last time his little brother had anything to eat at all, whole hundred miles between camp and the tavern and now here. 

“Do you -” 

Sam’s face heats up, rolls his eyes, defensive. 

“Nah, s’okay. It’s not… I mean, I’m not hungry. It’s just… something that happens, I guess.”

There’s a jagged shard of unease that washes over Dean, the way his brother doesn’t ever seem to be hungry these days, all these nosebleeds and migraines and too much fucking drinking.

“Is it - new, is it new?”

He licks his lips and tries not to look too invested, looks Sam in the forehead instead of the eye, feeling bolder that way, pretty sure Sam can’t tell the difference. 

A thumb on Dean’s bottom lip and he blinks fast, down at Sam’s icy hand. His brother’s eyes are half-lidded and glazed over, new heat in his gaze that worries him a little bit but it could just be the heat. He doesn’t know what he does to his brother but he can get an idea, feels the same shock to his system every time Sam touches him, alive with the the prohibition of it. 

It’s such a strange thing, being in love with Sam. It never wanes, no matter how hard Dean tries. It never even goes backstage for a little while, always first thing he thinks about when he wakes up and the last thing before he falls asleep. It doesn’t help much that Sam is always fucking there these days. 

It was easier with Sam at school, no face to wake up next to that Dean has to work himself up to convincing himself it’s okay to look at for longer than a span of two seconds. Best yet, he could pretend he wasn’t, one step closer every day to believing his mantra of, “Winchester, Dean. John Winchester’s boy, yeah. Sam? Yeah, don’t know where he is these days. We don’t really see eye-to-eye anymore. No, it’s okay, really, and anyway, that’s not what I’m here for.”

Sam takes his hand away and Dean’s mouth is still tingling. He runs his tongue along its edge and sucks in a long drag from his withering cigarette, relieved when his brother looks almost offended, waves the smoke away. 

“Thought you said you scrapped those.”

Dean shrugs. “Was gonna. They’re kinda nice, though. Help me sleep.”

“They’re gross.”

Dean nods, bites his lip and drags his feet off the ledge of the railing. He knows what Sam’s doing, can’t distract Dean for as long as he might think. 

“So? They new or not?”

“What, you talkin’ about my stomach?”

Dean’s face is deadpan. Sam groans. He sets his palm against the wood with a smack and hoists himself up so he’s sitting with his back to the sunlight, perched on the porch ridge, a perfect shadow that protects Dean’s eyes from the sliver of orange ahead of them. 

“Yeah, they’re new. Got ‘em a couple years ago, I guess.” Sam shrugs like it’s nothing. It’s not nothing, not to Dean, but he can play it off as otherwise, always could. 

“Right, okay. You keepin’ an eye on them?”

Sam smacks his lips and lets his jaw fall open in mock astonishment, this giddy little grin on his face. “Christ, Dean, you’re right. Think it could be stomach cancer or somethin’? Maybe you’re right, I should get this checked out.” 

Dean swings at him but it’s loose and not aimed right and it makes the chair rock forward, knocks his chin against Sam’s knee, who cackles at him like some maniac, and that makes Dean laugh too. 

“Whatever, Sammy.”

Sam flips up his middle finger and winks, his eyes dangerous and wild, and tells Dean, “It’s Sam.”

Dean doesn’t even try to hide his smile. 

______________

From her spot at her favorite window seat, Lorraine whistles to herself, tongue clicking against her gums. Her favorite rabbit in her lap, she watches them saunter back inside. There’s a glint to the tall one’s smile, a gentle look in his eyes she hasn’t seen in way too long.

“Hoo, boy, that’s somethin’ mighty special,” she laughs, scratching the poor animal behind its ears.  
_______________

Sam is first to shower, so much time spent sweating in the sun making him oily and gritty, soft skin striped scarlet with sunburn. 

His brother’s outside still, the sun so far from setting and Dean’s on his last can of the cardboard carton six-pack. They could stay here awhile if they had to, Sam would be okay. They’ve got this fun-sized burden in their backseat though, something they can’t just skip out on because it’s like Sam said when he told Dean that had to go, when will they ever be down in New Mexico again? 

There’s hair in his eyes when he ducks under the spray and it’s rusty, smells like sulfur, and didn’t Dean warn him about something like that and some point earlier? It goes cold fast and he’s in and out before he takes it all, doesn’t want to deal with Dean’s bitching later. He brushes his teeth over the drain, watches it splash to his toes and snake down the pipes. 

He’s practically purring, can’t keep still, and really if this was all it took, his head clear and feathery all at once, that first step towards bridging things back up with Dean on its way to working. 

He swings his arm out and grabs at the first towel it touches, can’t stop smiling, and thinks, it’s been a long fucking week. 

Long year, really, if Sam thinks about it, whole lifetimes passing by and it’s all in a blur, each day stretched longer and Stanford feels like a delusion at this point. It goes by so much faster out here, always driving, running like the river, whole days to be spent with just him and Dean, miles between theirs’ and the next car. 

There’s that ink in the mirror when he eyes himself through the fog, presses two fingers to where it sits, right smack against the pulse of his jugular, so much weight in two letters. 

Sam closes his eyes and remembers what it was like to feel Dean’s hands against that same spot only just earlier, the hitch in his breathing when he’d thrown himself back and clambered out of the car. 

He’s starting to worry Dean will never ask about it.   
_______________

Sam’s waiting for Dean, sprawled out across the bed when he comes out of the bathroom. Dean is complaining about the tiny towels that “don’t do much ‘sides cover my dick,” and “how the fuck am I supposed to get dry with this?” because if it wasn’t going to be the sulfur or the hot water, Sam supposes it would have to be this. 

Dean flicks droplets across the carpet when he whips his head up, and his eyes go blown when he sees it.

Sam’s shirtless on the bed, Dean’s bed, actually, and can’t his brother see he’s fucking claimed that one already, but what’s worse is he’s staring Dean up and down, beckoning him over with his tongue tucked in the corner of his mouth. 

It’s cliche and pathetic and so fucking hot Dean feels his stomach drop, blood rushing in his ears again. It’s supposed to be smooth sailing from here, no more to be said between the two of them about it because he’d asked Sam not to, has gone along with it since then, and so why the hell is it catching up on him now?

He’s satisfied with this system they’ve carved out for themselves, but Sam’s relentless now, always hungry for it and Dean doesn’t know when it’s okay to tell Sam “not right now”, when it’s not going to get him stoned to death by just the look in Sam’s eyes. 

And how does the rest of the world do it, is there some kind of off-switch? Is Dean supposed to let Sam decide when this shit is appropriate, when they’re allowed to pull the plug? Dean’s feeling white-hot panic, this idea that he won’t be able to hold out for long and one of these days Sam’s gonna snap at the idea of Dean telling him, no.

It’s easy to tell himself it’s probably just the newfound availability of it to Sam, the novelty of having Dean to himself again, but really even that’s not enough of an answer because it had never been like this in the beginning. 

“Sam…”

“Don’t talk about it, remember?”

Of course his brother would twist the knife on him with his own words like that.   
Usually it’s Sam pushing to talk, Dean glaring daggers at him through the rearview until Sam doesn’t even dare. 

“Yeah, I fuckin’ got that, thanks.” He spits it out, thirty hours on the road and no sleep between the two of them that makes him on-edge and insane. 

Sam’s got something between his fingers and he’s working it back and forth, a glint that keeps catching on Dean’s eye and it’s so fucking distracting, like Sam wasn’t enough on his own. A look closer and it’s Dean’s old switchblade, a half-assed birthday present from John for when he turned eighteen. It’s been a while since he’d since the thing, years, even, but he doesn’t have time to wonder how many of those it’s been with Sam. 

Dean ignores him, pulls his eyes off his brother’s chest and says he’s going out to pick up dinner and does Sam want anything. Sam stiffens, no coolness to salvage in his glare. Dean tries not to flinch. He never knows where he goes wrong with Sam at times like this. 

Sam shoves past him, goes for the bathroom again and Dean thinks that was the part where he was supposed to just go with it. 

They’ve always been bad at this, anyway, it never changes. 

He thinks about following his brother in, then decides against it, decides he really does not feel like getting clipped in the eye tonight.   
____________

It’s three hours later when Dean makes his way back to their room. 

He sits out in the parking lot and bakes for a good half of one of those hours, his heart pulled all the way back against his shoulder blade in that goddamn tightening thing it does when Sam’s upset with him. It’s never enough to tiptoe around him - when Sam walks through a room angry, the whole fucking house goes quiet, his rage silent and wild, somehow. Dean has never understood why he can’t just be mad the way the rest of them do it. 

It’s all so repetitive for Dean. Fact is, he spends more time working his way out of the line of fire he’s cornered himself into with Sam than he does actually getting along with the kid, this push-and-pull thing they do with each other that riles them up and works them over until one of them almost dies and then they’re back to square one. 

He finds Sam in the bathtub, blood pouring from his nose, all of his clothes back on.

Something is wrong. They don’t talk about it. Dean just pulls Sam up by his elbow, sets him up on the edge of the tub and tells him to apply pressure, all this torn-off toilet paper dangling to his knees and his mouth blubbery and wet. 

If he says anything legible to Dean, he doesn’t hear it. There’s blood on Dean’s jeans but he won’t let Sam close enough to try and dab at it with the towel, frantic apologies blurring on Sam’s tongue but Dean’s not listening, just telling Sam to hold still, stop moving, Christ kid stop moving. 

Always Christ, followed by “kid” that makes Sam shut the fuck up, a charm since Dean can remember.

“The fuck is going on with you, Sammy,” Dean curses, and it means more than he lets on. The way Sam’s shuddering, he knows it to. 

That hurt look on his brother’s face again and Dean is reminded of the time when he came home from work one day and Sam had left the gas stove lit. They were twelve and fifteen, respectively. 

He’d heard the leak before he caught it, Sam nowhere to be found in their one-room living space and the stove clear save for the pot of noodles, still steamy on the countertop. 

Upstairs, the speakers were blasting. 

Dean’s hands, one with the lighter and one with the cigarette, were shaking long after he lunged for the stove, dialed it all the way off, furious and paralyzed. 

He’d dragged Sam downstairs by his hair and screamed at him until the boy was sniveling, clutching at Dean’s wrist, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, you’re hurting me, God, Dean, I didn’t know, never used one before, please, fuck!”

It should’ve been enough to make him quit, bad habit that costed him more than he’d ever admit to Sam out loud, every month. Instead, it just made him extra careful around Sam, that fragility that comes with being the little brother and needing protection even when Dean knows he’s just fine without.

It’s a bloody nose, Dean tells himself. Sam tells him too, over and over again in his ear, trying to swat him off like the heat, still obviously so indefinitely mad at Dean, whatever reason behind it. 

There’s blood all over Sam’s shirt, too, and the utter hypocrisy of him trying to get Dean to change out of his jeans for that reason makes him want to laugh. He pulls Sam’s shirt over his head instead, urges it off with both hands and a couple of grunts that’re supposed to mean, “up, now, Sam”. Sam gets the picture pretty well. He usually does.

They run the water and it goes down red no matter how clean they think they’ve gotten the place, and Sam says, 

“Goddamn, don’t know how the killers do it in the movies,”

And that’s supposed to make Dean laugh, so he does.

There’s a line of blood trailed down Sam’s temple, put there by his fingernail, probably. Dean goes to swipe it away, follows it to his jaw, then jerks back again when he realizes what he’s doing. 

It’s close, too close, and he’s not ready to tell Sam he knows about it, not yet.

Sam doesn’t have anything to say about it, his hand flying up to the side of his face. 

“What? Somethin’ there?”

Dean snickers, filled up with quick-wit and instinct again. “Nothin’ but ugly. Don’t worry.” 

Sam snarls, gnashes his teeth. 

Dean gets a flash of wrong from his brother’s gaze and he has to stand up fast, get out of there because it never stops making him weak, that helpless feeling that comes with the possibility of not being able to get Sam out of this one, whatever the fuck it is. 

The blood is mopped up now, what’s left of it cold and drying.

Their fast food is on the table and getting soggy but Sam grabs Dean by the wrist. He has to will himself not to pull away this time, knows what to do now.

Their foreheads knock together and Dean falls to pieces, forfeits all else but this because really, it’s always been Sam, and he can handle that, if nothing else. 

He’s got a bad feeling about this, but it’s better than it was, and this time, he pulls Sam to him, little gasping breaths that’re supposed to sound like his brother’s name, and when he licks his way in, expects to taste something darker inside of Sam, all he finds is his brother, and isn’t that all the cause Dean needs to continue. 

“Yeah, Dean, yeah, knew you would come around, c’mere, God, don’t stop.”

Dean’s not sure it’s true, pretty sure this isn’t something he ever wants to get used to, thinking maybe he’s not so wicked as long as he clings to the fact that it’s wrong and he shouldn’t, but it’s a lost cause right now and if it makes Sam happy. 

Curled wet rings of brown in his palms and rings of black under his brother’s lashes, and they’re sprawled out across the bathroom floor, Dean’s hand on Sam’s cock and never enough time to breathe while being shaken to the bone like this, but Dean’s got all the time in the world for this, and he’s waited long enough.

He bares his throat to Sam and vows right then and there, 

“Not goin’ anywhere, Sammy. Long as you’ll have me, right here I’ll be, swear it on my life, on-”

It disappears between their lips, his brain single-circuit and frantic. Sam knew what he was going to say anyway. He forgets what he’s supposed to be saying fast, his brother’s hands on him and his voice doing that funny little hitch it does when Dean mouths just right at his ear. 

Some things never change. Dean’s so fucking glad some things do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As the days pass by my mind  
> Are the wrong, the right  
> You are my sunshine  
> And as the night begins to die  
> We are the morning birds that sing against the sky
> 
> -GVF


	4. Change is Gonna Come

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam's a habit Dean just can't quit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SO much gratitude for all of you that have made it this far.   
> I've still got quite the story to tell. Come by for more, I'm here all week, folks.
> 
> The soundtrack of this fic, the 'From the Fires' album by Greta Van Fleet is SO worth the listen, and if you appreciate this fic, you'll appreciate them, too. Plus, I think Dean would like their Zeppelin feel.

Two days later, out on the road again and farther than they were before from John’s burial site. 

They’re dead on their asses, passed out across the seats of the Impala when the call comes in. The line filters through to Bobby’s panicky apology for calling them at a time like this, but were they still out West and if so, it’d be mighty convenient, and could they just?

A rugaru, Bobby had said, dirt on his tongue when he’d choked out the word. Already two people dead and not worth the risk to wait it out for the off chance he could get another guy down there in time. He would do it himself, he’d sworn, but he’d taken it pretty bad from a bullet wound to the shoulder (bloody vampires) and who the hell knows if he could even hold a weapon right now. 

Bobby didn’t need to give them a reason - the boys were itching for a hunt. 

Directions to Roswell straight to their phones and the promise of a job sent them flying another near hundred miles out of their way again but there’s no residue of objection. 

They finish it off fast, their first real hunt since their dad and they work better together when they’re on the same page, Sam notes. Things have been pretty much all smooth sailing and sunny weather between the two of them, no taut strings of anxiety unraveling their affinity. It’s less grueling this way, jobs like this, when he can turn around, his back against Dean’s, and grin when he’s giving the signal to fire off a sawed-off. 

They leave laughing and bloody, Dean’s arm around Sam’s shoulders and a glint in his eye. Sam could pretty much be holding up the moon at times like that.   
____________

“Want some?”

Dean holds out his palm to Sam, hand filled halfway with hard candy, his mouth already brimming. Sam makes a face, his eyes gone squinty. He looks down at the candy, the dry heat melting their colors to Dean’s skin, bands of color across his palm like rainbows in the oil slick. He looks back at Dean.

“You know what, I think I’m gonna pass this time.”

Dean cackles, tips his head back and dumps the rest into his already-stuffed mouth, his jaw unhinged. The backs of his teeth are tinted hues of orange-blue-brown. 

“Whatever, buzzkill.”

Sam grimaces, a little shake of his shoulders because Dean can just be so gross sometimes, but he doesn’t even know if he really believes that or if that’s just what he’s supposed to think, courtesy of a lifetime of experience being the little brother.

He averts his eye back to his knees, ripped edge to the stitching on the sides that make the string stand up straight in the arid static, thinks of where they’re supposed to be.

He can’t stop fidgeting, picks at his jeans every time Dean’s eyes are on him a little too long, all this staring, Sam knows, because of long stretches of time spent without being allowed it. Cases are hard, worse so when there’s so much more now and all they can do is sit there, sit an appropriate measure apart and offer maybe a polite, professional smile at one another. And there was a time, Sam knows, when they were two thousand miles apart and would’ve given anything to just make eyes again. 

Sam feels that burning sensation at the back of his neck that means Dean’s gawking at him again, less time with his eyes spent on the road than on Sam. He doesn’t look up, his foot bouncing antsily against the doorframe. There’s a book between his thighs that he’d be reading if he weren’t so distracted, left open and waiting but Sam can’t keep his mind straight, his breath fumbly and ragged. 

“Stop fuckin’ staring.”

Dean balks, his shoulders gone rigid. He whips his head back to the road and blinks rapidly for a few times like it doesn’t quite compute. Sam’s pretty sure he’s pretending he didn’t hear him, though, because his brother has turned up the radio and is thumping along against the outer door with the freed hand out the window. His ring thwacks against the paint with every smack of the beat of the drums, old hazey sound of the Cassette making the speakers sound fuzzy. 

He starts singing, too, of all things, this crazy off-key thing which is ridiculous and just to put Sam on edge, he’s sure of it, because in all actuality Sam is old enough now to admit that Dean’s voice isn’t half bad when he’s really trying. There have been enough Metallica lullabies in Sam’s life for him to be able to attest to something like that. It’s not something he’ll probably ever let Dean in on. 

“Dude, what the fuck is with you? You’re not drunk or anythin’ so stop acting like it, it’s a long drive, I don’t want to deal with it.”

Dean snickers, bobs his head to the music. His hair is impossibly atrocious in the wind now, tossed across his head like washed-up swamp weed on the banks, clumped and golden and Sam doesn’t even have to look up to know what his brother looks like right now. Fact is, when Dean cups a hand around the back of his neck and tries to get him to sway along to Bob Seger, Sam knows he can’t look over, doesn’t trust himself, because he’s got this fucking beautiful image in his head and he knows if he looks over and it’s exactly how he’s pictured, he’ll be wrecked for the rest of the trip.

He paws Dean away, growling. “Giddoff me, asshole.” It slips right out, hissed through his teeth and he keeps his eyes on his book when they grow wide, his heart rabbiting in his chest at what that’s gonna mean to Dean. 

“Ah, Sammy, you’re so fuckin’ easy,” is all he says, his hand slipping off Sam’s neck to squeeze at the meat of his shoulder. Sam clenches his fists and prays to whatever’s out there that Dean can’t tell he’s blushing behind his hair. 

“Oh, yeah? Is that what it is?”

Dean laughs, giddy and distracted but he knows Route 66 like he knows the sky is blue and he can count the paces of each mile, tell you what’s along the way and where that one tourist attraction is and anything else you’d want to do out here, which Sam supposes isn’t much, but for some reason it’s Dean’s favorite route of transport. Besides, Sam had gotten over being jumpy about Dean’s driving years before it had even gotten them in their first bad accident; it just wasn’t worth the breath it took to argue. 

“Think you’re just a baby ‘bout everythin’, s’what I think. Can’t even handle a little small talk on the road?”

Sam laughs, slight shake of his shoulders that doesn’t mean much because Dean is testing him, nothing much else to do out here anyway, and Dean won’t ever let Sam drive - even if it means a few extra hours of sleep to catch up on. 

Dean keeps talking at Sam but the words on the page are starting to filter through Sam’s perception, no appreciation for his brother’s endless babble once the book starts making sense. 

It’s an old one, jammed under the backseat from some time ago when Sam was younger. Seventeen, he thinks, if he correctly recognizes the origin of the name of the high school printed on its library checkout card. 

Junior English, he thinks, his AP Lit class. George Orwell. 1984. He’s read it already, he’s sure of it, and the book isn’t looking like it used to, all torn and frayed at the edges but it gives Sam something to do, and he remembers liking this one. 

They pass another county line, this one hungrier for rain than the last, when Sam realizes. 

It’s the circled letter ‘E’ that gives it away. It stands right out in bold black, bordered by a loopy circle drawn in faded blue pen ink. 

Sam just about dies.

Dean’s pretty much given up on conversation, his hands off the stereo and his head tipped back with his shades on, and Sam has never been more alert around him in his life. 

A circled ‘A’ after that, and than an ‘N’, next a ‘D’, then another ‘E’, before another ‘A’, ‘N’. 

This had been the book he’d circled every letter of Dean’s name in order, obsessively. God, so many years ago, on the slow back roads of Oklahoma when there was nothing to do in the backseat besides listen to his father snore, count the tennis shoes on the telephone wires. 

Every letter with a neat little circle around their script, at least a hundred times until the end of the first chapter, like the book was written that way. 

Sam rips the book open and starts tearing out the pages, shreds them right up in his hands and throws them out the window. They flutter in crooked shapes of white into the late night air, crowded together against the wind. 

“The fuck did you do that for, Sammy?” Dean shoots him a look, blazed with worry and he’s looking at Sam like he was a stranger in his shotgun seat. 

“Don’t worry,” Sam grins, eyes watery in the dust flecks flooding in. “It’s biodegradable.”

Dean chokes, shakes his head. “I just don’t friggin’ get you.” 

____________

Dean manages to smuggle three packs of Marlboro Lites and a handful of Slim Jims into his jacket pocket at the local Gas N’ Sip before Sam catches on. 

His glare is on Dean through the length of the interaction with the store clerk, that thick, plastered-on apologetic smile that always leaves people with some false sense of security around Sam that Dean marvels at. 

Sam slides ten battered one dollar bills across the counter (their last for a while, Dean will have to get back to the bars, swing them some cash that way) and then two carelessly tinfoil-wrapped burritos. He leaves a tip for the old man behind the counter: three-something-dollars that seems to make the man overwhelmingly happy, almost makes Dean feel bad for stealing. 

He grins absurdly, waves a can of E-Z Cheez spray over his head, and clicks his heels in the air - a complicated feat with the jumbo energy drink in his pants weighing down the backside of his cargos. 

Sam shoots him the snottiest glare and slaps their last five-dollar bill onto the counter to cover for the rest of what Dean’s snagged, who cackles silently across the aisles at him, tumultuous green eyes glistening. He keeps his hand pressed tight over his mouth, because it’s all a big secret game to him, apparently. 

Then Sam bowls past the chips display, straight towards Dean. 

“Too easy,” Dean says again through a whistle, once Sam has him by the belt loops, that crimped mouth crooked with a smirk and Dean’s stomach all twisted up with Sam’s hands on him. Too long since he’s had him so close and all Dean wants to do is shove him back against the Pringles and fuck up his perfect mouth a little. “Guy never saw it coming.”

Sam scoffs, a sharp inhale and a hot puff of breath against Dean’s throat where he’s leaning down to get to ear-level. Quick-wit, faster thinker, Sam nips at his earlobe. “Yeah, well, it’s all so goddamn funny until you’ve spent our last fifteen-something on junk you don’t even like.”

Dean blinks. He’s got nothing to say to that. He doesn’t have time, anyway, because Sam hauls him out of the store and tells him to pipe the hell down while he squawks, doesn’t want to give the old man any excuse to check his tapes, should he have any.   
In the car, Dean’s kept quiet with a lighter and a snatched cigarette. It’s twisted why he lets himself smoke in his car, all that scent wrapped up in her leather but it’s only ever with the door open, his sacredest place filtered out by wind whipped up by one of the worst sandstorms Dean’s seen in these parts since he was a boy. 

Sam came around his side of the car to cuff him over the side of the head. 

“Don’t pull that shit again, else I’ll just tell the fucker next time, jackass.” 

Dean beams so hard his teeth ache. 

Sam only gets this bitchy when he’s hungry or heavily turned on, and they’ve both got burritos, so it’s not the prior. 

Dean watches him carefully out of the corner of his eye, but Sam knows because he’s on edge about it and strung-out. It’s been a while since Dean has been able to say more than a few words to his brother that weren’t some distorted method of getting Sam to yell at him. Any attention from Sam is so much better than none at all, and Dean is suddenly so glad the kid’s book is all torn up and useless to distract Sam with. 

He doesn’t know how Sam has so much control over everything Dean is but he supposes he had something to do with letting it happen, somewhere along the line.

The road holds them together with phone lines and tumbleweed strands, keeps them from going at each other’s throats and sucking on the honied sunset instead, knee-deep in Santa Fe atmosphere again and the view is just gorgeous. 

Sam is still fevering with indignation at the fact that Dean doesn’t want to stop for the night, wants to go all the way through until morning when they’re supposed to bury their dad, fucking finally. 

Dean said, “Christ, brother, it’s like you want him sitting ‘round long as possible.”

Sam told him that sounds like the worst possible thing.   
___________

Not even eight o’clock yet and their beer supply has been dried empty for a good twenty-four hours, Dean too obstinate to admit Sam was right about stealing things he didn’t need. Technically, had Sam not paid the guy back for it, it might have been worth the trouble. Dean was fucking thirsting for a beer, at the least. 

He runs his hand back and forth, harpstyle across the seat’s threading with his feet kicked up in the passenger seat. Sam was behind him, otherwise symmetrical, sitting diagonally so they were facing each other. They’ve just put the cards away, didn’t even shuffle the deck or play a single game but Dean would rather be talking anyway.

Sam sits up, rolls his shoulders back and sucks his mouth dry of spit, bloodshot eyes like floodlights on Dean. 

“When’re you gonna let me fuck you again?”  
Dean chokes on his own inhale. 

He’s thought about it, too, since that first time Sam had kissed him around the flames. Late nights spent with all that pent-up shit to deal with and so much to work out between them, already, and Dean’s been so fucking tired, it’s starting to show on his face. It’s not something he could really avoid considering, besides. Now just really isn’t the time to toss it over.

“What?”

“You know what.” 

“No, actually, I don’t think I do.” Dean says, terrified, suddenly.

“Listen, I know we’ve got Dad to handle, and-”

“Stop saying it like that.” 

He’s furious and he doesn’t know how to get a grip on it all, his nerves feeling all wound up in his spine, because Sam doesn’t get where he’s coming from, and how could Dean have expected him to, he realizes.

“He’s your fuckin’ father, have some respect or… at least, like, pretend to, I don’t care.”

Dean watches Sam’s brain skid to a stop. Whatever was on his mind is dead silent, now. Deep down, Dean probably knows that wasn’t fair. 

A flash of annoyance in Sam’s eyes and Dean’s stomach lurches because there’s that Something Else again - that same look Sam gets when he’s killing these days, the dangerous kind. Dean’s jaws snap closed against his tongue. It wells up and springs red.

“Right, well,” Sam persists, giant eyes inky and dense with no streetlights on around them. “You know what I meant. And anyway, you gonna answer me?”

“I don’t know.”

Sam looks lost. “Don’t know what?”

“I don’t know when, Sam. Christ, college boy, I know you’re not slow, the hell is this to you? Tryna make me say it or something?”

Sam’s eyes drop to his hands, soft again. There’s a twinge of remorse that catches on Dean’s heart while he watches him fidget. “Are you ever gonna? Let me, I mean?”

Dean shivers. Those kinks in his veins unwind themselves and for a moment he can see straight again, and he knows what he wants. He can see Sam on top of him so vividly, warm and heavy and guiding him just right, those long fucking limbs he can get lost in wrapped so good around him.

“I don’t fucking know, fuck!” 

Sam’s voice gets dark and quiet. “Are we ever gonna just let it be?”

Dean can’t help it. He just laughs at him. “Which part? You leaving or you coming back?”  
It’s a lick of fire on Dean’s tongue and he can’t even regret it once it’s out there, and Sam recoils instantly. “Sorry, Sam, sorry.” But he’s not sure he means it. 

“Yeah.”

The car closes in around them and Dean doesn’t know why he’s trying to hide it from his brother, the broiling fury in his eyes. He’s never been able to hide anything from Sam for long and it’s not like he’s doing a damn good job of it. 

“Hey. Look.”

“I get it, Dean.”

There’s that laugh again, spun out on the end of a snort. “No you don’t. Don’t tell me you get it, you fuckin-”

Somehow they always end up here. Dean never knows how it starts until it’s stabbing him in the gut. “You don’t know, Sam. You’re never gonna know.”

Sam tears a wounded little noise from his windpipe. 

“I never left you, Sam, never woulda dreamed of it. You know that. You- you never even asked me, asked if I wanted to go with you.” He hiccups, his mouth wrenched into a sad kind of smile. 

“To Stanford, Dean?” And for a second he really looks frantic, desperate look in his eyes like a wild baby animal. He looks like, if Dean would let him, he’d be holding on for dear life. “I was gonna. I knew you. Now, you might, but back then, back then you wouldn’t have even considered-”

“Just having the option woulda been nice! Finding out earlier than when you threw it in Dad’s face woulda meant somethin’ too!” Dean reels, has to press a palm to his temple. “I loved you, so much. I wanted in on your life so bad, I would’ve given anything. Anything, Sam. So yeah, I would’ve gone. Would’ve waited in line for that ride.” He laughs, falling apart at the seams. 

Sam quiets, the rest of the world around them frozen in place. Dean can see the nuts and bolts knocking against his brother’s skull again, calculating some kind of well-thought and careful answer. 

Dean’s reminded of the time he told himself he would never end up here again. He wishes it were easy like he’d meant it to be. He feels like a fucking time bomb. Sooner or later, it’s always gonna be him and Sam again, and he doesn’t know what that thought is supposed to do to him. 

Dean’s lungs have shrunk to half their size. He can’t get a breath in. 

“I’m not doing this right now, and you know what. You just - God, you were the single most beautiful fuckin’ thing in my life and I was supposed to keep you close, always me and you, remember? And you - you started this thing that I was supposed to go along with and you let me… touch you. You know what that’s like, finding out that what’s got you all fucked up about yourself doesn’t make you a freak all on your own, and then you-”

The weight on his chest takes his breath away and he’s left gasping, veins cut off and seering. “And then you leave?”

Sam whimpers. 

If Dean wasn’t so blinded by this maddening uncertainty he’s so caught up in, he’d want to comfort his brother. That temptation goes comatose when Sam asks, “So, is it always gonna be like this? Even still?”

The dread in Sam’s voice doesn’t go unnoticed and Dean wants to cradle him, beg him to let him take it all back, that of course not, he was here for Sam ‘till the end. 

“I wish I knew, kid. It’s just.”

“Yeah.”

“It just takes time.”

Sam presses his lips together with a fierce shine in his eye, like he’s not going to settle with that kind of an answer. Dean watches him, the tentative tilt to his head when he sees that Dean’s got eyes on him. He scritches at his palm, dry with dirt from graveyard digging and cut up around the knuckles. Dean focuses on those hands, draws his gaze back from the begging Sam’s eyes imply. 

“Dean, I- there’s something seriously wrong with me. I don’t - I mean, I get it, that you want to wait. I get that you need it, but I - it’ s been so long, and I, God, it’s so fucked up, but I don’t know how I’m supposed to wait.”

Dean’s blood freezes in his veins. This is something he’s has been waiting for all of Sam’s life, and even then, it still rocks him to his core to hear Sam lay claim to it. Making this boy the center of his universe meant that Dean has never learned how to say no to his brother. The more he thinks about it, the more he’s sure that Sam probably really believes that. There’s never been a time for Dean to deny his brother of anything, from breakfast cereal or his time, to his reason for living. 

Sam doesn’t know what it’s like to hear his brother cut him down. Dean’s pretty sure Sam’s so mixed up about it all that he can’t understand that there’s more beyond the two of them and their place in the world, real people with real lives and normal problems, that take up as much worth as he’s spent his whole life showing Sam he is. He’s got Dean so locked in that he’s sure Dean would never challenge that with a thought. 

Him and Sam, against all else.   
Accept for this. This one is on Sam.

“You want to make somethin’ out of this? You’re gonna have to.”

He cranks the window up, rolls onto his side and curls his face into the crook of the belt buckle slot, lets his eyes fog up because if Sam can’t see him then his pride isn’t wounded. He’s largely exhausted, can’t calm this growing ache long enough to sleep, all of this damn adrenaline. Dean dozes off for a moment, and then there’s ice cold hands against his chest and the driver’s side door is wide open. 

What’s worse is Sam is on top of him, climbing over the seats in a way that reminds Dean so much of an octopus he has to blink sleep from his vision, make sure he’s seeing straight. It’s Sam, in the flesh, no doubt about it, all arms, all of a sudden, and wrapping himself around Dean’s back, feral and heedless. 

Dean turns his head halfway round its axis. They stare at each other a draining thirty seconds. Sam blinks first. Dean’s feet are hanging out into the open air and the arm he’s got crushed under the cushion has gone numb with the weight but Sam’s not moving. 

This is the part where Dean is supposed to tell his brother, no. He can’t remember what kind of boundaries that shitstorm was supposed to build up between them but he’s pretty sure it entailed an end to this, or at least blurred the lines that allowed it a little. 

“Dean,” Sam manages, and his hands shouldn’t feel so good dancing up Dean’s ribs. The goosebumps are probably from the cold, if Sam asks. 

He can’t help it. He reaches up to trap his hands over Sam’s knuckles, has never been one to deny himself. Dean can feel the dip of Sam’s throat on his skin as he swallows, that scanty flutter of his heartbeat, sticky-hot puff of hair flush against him. 

There’s no sliver of space between them, Dean trapped against the seat and Sam’s ass has to be digging into the steering wheel by now. Dean can smell him everywhere, tangerines and something spicy, diner food and his favorite travel soap, the cinnamon tang of his chewing gum. Dean is heady with it. 

“What,” he says, lamely. 

“Whatever it takes,” Sam says, and it sounds to Dean like an oath, like his brother has just signed over his life to Dean, and maybe Dean already has, too. 

He goes to reassure Sam, maybe make his side of the promise or something because that’s probably what his brother expects but he can’t right now. Squeezing Sam’s hand tight as he can, he strains his neck so Sam has room to rest against him, the two of them two sizes too big for this car and it’s friggin’ impractical as hell.

Sam’s lashes are wet when they flutter on Dean’s cheek, kissing at his temple. Dean knows what he’s going to say but he lets him do it anyway, and he won’t start crying, he won’t.

“You gotta know how sorry I am.”

“I know that, brother. It’s just not enough right now.”

“Ok,” Sam whispers. Then again, more sure this time. “Ok.”

“You still gonna stick around?” Dean laughs, but it’s not funny and comes out hoarse and ruined.

A soft kiss to his hair. “Long as you’ll have me.”

“We are so fucked.” 

Sam chuckles, chest pressed tight to Dean and he’s so completely aware of it, more so when that shallow voice murmurs with a tremor that ripples through Dean, “Knew that already.”   
_________________

“I do. Love you, you know,” Sam hushes, and he has to think he’s asleep, wouldn’t dare otherwise, head ducked and nose tucked into the collar of his brother’s shirt. “That never changes.”

That halfway-place between wake and dream and he hears it, soft-spoken and so fast Dean could’ve probably imagined it, if he let his mind wander that far off the res, ever.   
Dean’s whole body trembles like the current. He doesn’t say anything at all. He’s soaring.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, I go down to my brother  
> And I say  
> Brother, help me breathe  
> But he winds up  
> Knocking me back down  
> On my knees
> 
> -GVF


	5. Highway Tune

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam has his first vision.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, my intentions were to write a completed chapter a day. That plan fell through a little. I hope you’ll accept this extra long one as an apology. Also, raise your hand if you think Sam has a hair kink (he definitely does).  
> I don’t know why I have to end every chapter with making out but take my word for it, it’s hard not to when you have the entire storyline of Sam and Dean at your mercy.

Late night. Hot air rising.  
They’re back in Fort Marcy again, Hill of the Martyrs just around the corner.

Dean had come on to Sam strong, whipped their tent open and torn his way through Sam’s sleeping bag, his hands on Sam’s hips, dragging him down to meet his mouth in the middle of the night. He was supposed to be sleeping in the car, watching for the sandstorm, just in case, he’d said. They’d rock-paper-scissored for it, and rock-paper-scissors never fails Sam.

Sam wasn’t expecting Dean until morning, not for the rest of the night at least. 

Which was okay. Dean does this sometimes, and when he does, Sam is usually ready for it. Space and time alone to think is a hot commodity between the two of them. 

When Dean had come through, his patience worn thin by the looks of that pretty little bowstring mouth, Sam had been lying on his side, curled up around his open sleeping bag. He’d been reading - something fresh and new - a tourist’s guide to New Mexico that he’d snatched on the way out of that Gas N’ Sip, years ago now, it seemed. 

Dean hadn’t even wasted the time for words, just slithered in on his knees across the crinkling plastic of the tarp floor, smothered Sam against him with his eyes all glassy. Glassy and promising, a stark contrast between the blotted marks of red under Sam’s own - dust in his tired eyes, straining to squint up at his eager brother.

No hint of a warning and then Dean was everywhere, working away in Sam’s mouth with his tongue, twisting and tasting, and Sam so was eager, so fucking hungry for him. He’d slammed up into Dean, wound his hands around his brother and let his name crowd his throat. It’s just one of those things with Dean, and Sam knows when to go with it because he never knows when it’ll happen again. 

Sam flipped Dean over so fast it pulled one of the tent stakes loose. Dean’s eyes were velveteen and fucking endless, no restraint left. He wanted to tug Dean’s hair and make him say something, make excuses for himself or something. His heart surged with so much love he couldn’t get a word out, sickly sweet and a low twinge of nostalgia because it used to be so easy, being in love with his brother. 

Sam came with his face between his brother’s legs, fisting his cock. 

It had been so fucking long since Dean had admitted he wanted. 

Since then, it’s still too hot for pants. Fire still burning outside because it reached below zero before sleep ever caught up to them, but until then. Until then, always stifling in the worst of ways, Dean perpetually slick with sweat, his eyelids shiny with it. All of Sam’s blood is stuck under the epidermal layer of his face and chest, bright red and burning, all of the time. 

Eating Dean out was totally impractical, intense heat wave passing through that seared Dean’s thighs with heat rash from the friction, legs boxed tight around Sam’s ears. But they had been hot anyway, and so. 

Sam’s been too confounded to get dressed again for about an hour now. And so they’re still naked, shameless and woozy with sex.

Dean’s head is flattened to the flushed plane of Sam’s chest, his forehead crushed to the side of Sam’s chin. Sam is helplessly reeling from it all. He keeps licking his lips, can’t bring himself to move. There’s a hand against his hip, knuckles that rake across his ribcage and back down again, the stick of Dean’s ring tagging on Sam’s hipbone every other time. His skin is alive. 

A week later, and everything is so much simpler than it ever was before his leaving. 

He’s hyper aware of Dean’s hands on him, strong and able and they’ve cracked necks before, beaten bad things to death, but they’re so fucking delicate, now, muted strokes against his torso. 

Sam keeps replaying that image of his brother inside his head, the rest of his mind television static, wholly smoked out besides the way Dean looks with his head tipped back, begging with his mouth torn open in a cry. How he’d curled his lip when Sam’s fingers crooked just right, that quiver in his belly like he couldn’t get enough of Sam’s mouth. 

A hand reaches up to trail across Sam’s collarbone, weightless thumb strokes along his speckling skin, and it stings with sunburn just right, makes Sam hiss. Dean makes a sound and Sam grins. 

“I can feel you smiling,” he sneers, because it’s true, the heat of Dean’s mouth washing over him with the upward curve of his lips. 

Dean socks him in the ribs, bites at his pec with gnashing teeth. Sam cries out, curves into his side and ends up elbowing Dean in the stomach, solid hook to his side and Dean shouts, 

“Fuck!”

Sam groans, his fists clenched with the pain in his ribs. “Ow, you fucker! Not even gonna apologize for jabbing you now.”

“You don’t know what’s good for you, then.”

Dean pinches him, and Sam’s back arches up and away, shoulders grinding hard into the grit of tarp. He’s half-hard and getting harder, already so worked up because it’s Dean and that’s all it really takes him. His eyes fly closed and he grips Dean’s hip, sweat slipping their skin together. 

They roll to one side again and then Dean’s on top of him and when Sam goes to open his eyes, Dean is grinning down at him, sleek, spiky hair and smelling like dirt and oak and Sam, somehow. It comes out of him like a gasp, that realization. Dean takes advantage, rolls their hips flush and then dives for Sam’s mouth.

“Holy fuck,” Sam gasps, blood dammed in his veins. “If we had a bed right now…” 

Dean laughs, shakes his head and licks him open again, pushes past his lips and sucks at his tongue. Sam’s not sure he can even remember his own name or his face or the back of his hands. His heart feels heavy and leaden in his chest, drunk off of Dean. Dean pulls away panting, lips sleek and shining and Sam breaks into an easy smile, drags him back in by the back of his neck. 

“You’re so friggin’ dumb,” Dean chuckles, with his downward eyes and his shaking head. He’s only a shadow, darkness coming sooner than they’d thought. It’s just the glint of his teeth, his bright eyes glowing.

Sam’s coming undone.  
______________

Sam has his first vision at breakfast the next morning. 

There’s blood spurting from his nose in a steady stream of gore, and Dean makes a face of revulsion at him before Sam’s entire world goes red.

Dean’s clapping his boots out over the fire he’s just stomped out when Sam comes stumbling out of the tent, clutching at his temples with his face all wrenched up in hurt. 

“Damn. Lookin’ like a hooker on a bad night out, Sammy. You on a coke cleanse, somethin’?” 

Sam coughs out, “Dean,” and then falls to his knees and it’s not a fucking joke anymore.

Dean runs to him like running into a fire, and Sam’s slipping away at the edges because behind his eyes is all just yellow. He goes stiff with it, radiating pain, paddling through the liquid desert with cinderblock legs. 

Dean hollers, “Sam!”

And then Sam seizes against the ground, his lungs screaming. “Hurts,” he gasps, convulsing in the ochre sand. “Hurts, Dean. So bad.”

“What, Sam, what, you gotta- I can’t help until I know. Show me something, tell me what I’m s’posed to do!”

Sam’s got his eyes closed but it’s still too bright behind them, and his arms won’t lift to point to his head and he can’t stop shaking, anyway, just sways his head back and forth, moaning. 

Then the pictures start, brutal and bloody and Sam screams his throat raw. 

Dean holds his head in his lap and squeezes his hand and waits for it to stop. 

When Sam comes to again, Dean’s too unnerved to touch him. Shaky knees and aching head and Sam wakes up in the backseat of the car, thin blanket thrown over him haphazardly, and he’s sweat clean through it. There’s a good few minutes where he can’t figure out what he’s doing here, panic-stricken and nauseous with dread, plus everything else. 

Sam grounds himself when he sees Dean coming, a wash of relief that floods right through him, detoxes him instantly. He hates to see it’s that easy. It’s dangerous being this hooked on Dean. Means there’s no way to escape. 

Dean is looking disturbingly glad to see Sam vertical. The look on his face is euphoric, lit up and baffled but he doesn’t ask any questions. It sends a zip of warmth down Sam’s spine. Sam wants to run to him, would if he had the juice. 

His brother helps him out of the car and coaxes half a bottle of painkillers down his throat. Sam gags on them, sputtering. 

“Thought you were dead there for a second, brother.” 

Sam’s mouth quirks up with his brow. “Got you good, didn’t I?”

Dean goes to hit him, then snatches his hand back, face blooming with spots of red. 

Sam sniggers. “I’m fine, Dean.”

“What- Do you know what it was.”

It’s so fast and so breathy it sounds like he’s been holding the question in since Sam went down, his eyes blown wide and the bob in his throat unmistakable. 

Sam shrugs, scratches at his shoulder. Dean’s eyes on him make him squirm and he doesn’t know how to make it stop besides playing it down a little. It’s always been this way with Dean, this persistent need to know what is going on with Sam, his only real job since Sam was handed to him in a blanket.

Dean never stops asking him what he remembers, how he’s feeling, if his brain’s working okay. Sam doesn’t mean to snap. 

“Let up, Dean, Christ’s sake!”

Dean goes glacial, hard edge to his gaze and he turns away, stuffs his hands into his pockets. 

“Whatever you want, Sam. It’s whatever, if that’s what you want.”

Sam stares at him, stunned silent. He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to say so he doesn’t.  
Squeezes Dean’s shoulder, shakes him up a little, tries for a smile. His hands find Dean’s hairline at the dip of his skull and he scritches at it playfully, watches Dean swallow and duck his head away. 

Sam rolls his eyes. There’s white-hot tension trapped between them, wreaking havoc again. 

A pair of tumbleweeds flit past in a mess of tangled decay, and Sam keeps an eye on them with a sigh, wishing for rain. 

If they didn’t have a job to do, Sam would ask to go for a ride. 

“Probably a migraine, I’m thinking. Never gonna complain about a hangover again.” 

Dean steps back, empty laugh splitting him in two. His voice sounds menacing, unforgiving the way it gets when he’s interrogating. It’s thick and heated and ignores any reassurance. It pales Sam. 

“That’s rich. You get migraines like that often? Or better yet, ever?”

Sam looks down at his brother’s hands which are wringing themselves white, and he shudders. He clears his throat, fastens his eyes back to the ground. He thinks, it’ll never be easy, lying to Dean.

“No, never. I think it’s- I mean, it might be this place.”

Dean kind of snaps. He takes Sam by the wrist and forces him to look at him, that pained set of eyes like black glass lenses. Doubtful edge to his tone, he says, “This place.”

“I mean, I don’t know, Dean! What the fuck am I supposed to think? What do you want me to say?”

Dean grits his teeth, spits to the side. “I want you,” he growls, Commander voice that he gets after their Dad, and it would normally make Sam writhe with want with just the promise of it if it weren’t sounding so goddamn evil right now. “To be honest with me.”

Sam sighs, slinks back and jams his tongue to the roof of his mouth. Dean’s eyes never leave him. He knows it without looking up. 

“I mean, I remember a fire.”

“A fire? What do you mean, “you remember”?”

Sam’s eyes go cold. “You gonna let me finish?”

Dean waves his hand away, dismissive. “Sorry,” he gulps, strung tight. “You were saying.”

Sam feels a stir of pity at his center at the look on his brother’s face, all that worry so transparent. He looks tired, worked thin and raw from this and the heat, aged years in a matter of nights. If it were Dean, he thinks, if it were Dean, Sam could never get him to talk. 

“It was like, I don’t know, a dream. Kind of.” 

Dean cuts into him with this livid kind of warning look, pierces right into him, persistent waves of anger like Sam had just put himself into danger somehow. He feels preyed on, and he’s guilty for it. 

“Like a vision. Or, or something. I don’t know what I saw.”

“A vision? Like, some kind of psychic crap?”

“No, not like that, nothing like that, I mean. Not really.” Sam shakes his head, exasperated. He’s still bone-tired, every inch of him worn down and protesting at the thought of staying upright. 

“Then what, Sam?” He looks up and Dean’s eyes are pleading with him. 

“I think. I think it was happening right then. Like, I could see it with…”

“Front row seats?” Dean filled in grimly, dead eyes set in the distance, behind Sam.  
He allows himself to be surprised for a minute. 

“Yeah, exactly.” 

Dean nods, turns heel, and starts swinging things over each shoulder and hauling them to the car, Sam close on his heel, intensely alert because for all he knows Dean is leaving him. 

“What- the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Thousands of feet above sea level and the wind could knock Sam down right now, sweating and pale and in no shape to be stranded out here by himself. He grasps for Dean’s arm, half to steady himself and the rest in the hopes that he’ll turn, which he does, because it’s Dean. 

“We’re going to figure this out.”

“Dean,” Sam chokes. “I think… I think we already know.”

Dean blinks at him, his face rigid, passive. 

“It’s like what Dad said.” 

Everything is still. Sam is petrified of what Dean will do with information like that but he can’t look away from his brother. 

Dean’s gaze is hot and menacing, his knuckles gone white in clenched fists.

“That’s not. This is nothing like that, Sam. You said it. It’s a migraine, that’s all.”

Sam grimaces, scuffs his knuckles up his arm and scratches at his parched skin, trembling. “Dean,” he says, meeting Dean’s eyes again and he’s sincere this time, pleading. 

“There’s something really, very wrong with me.”

For the first time, Dean looks properly and authentically scared for him.  
_____________

They load up the car again without a word, this time with everything they’ve got. It’s bound to start raining, Dean swears. He is rarely ever wrong about these things. 

“Well,” Dean says cheerfully, his arm slung loosely around the front seat cushion, “Sorry, Pops. You’re gonna have to wait this one out.” He pauses to flinch, then adds, “Again.” There’s a pat to the cooler lid and then Dean turns back to Sam, gives him that unyielding grin Sam loves so much. He’s really good at pretending nothing’s wrong.

The sky looks too dark for so early, the sun swallowed up with the clouds and it’s so quiet that even the sagebrush is still. Sam smiles sadly at the icebox cornered against the back door, then up at the sky, and he tries to smile, but it just makes his eyes spring up with silent tears.  
________________

It all looks the same to Sam, vast belts of tawny farmland, fields of tilled, woven fabric that spans out in all directions, never ending. Here, at least, he can see past the trees, because there are none; nothing to stand in the way of the scenery and this way he can see all of New Mexico in the comfort of the car, long interludes of radio static between him and Dean and so what the hell else is there to do?

He tilts towards the window, twists at the cord of his wooden necklace. Dean eyes him, smiling, that fond little in-between look he gets when he gets sentimental or something, Sam guesses. He doesn’t look up, just stares at the blur of muddy plains that lay like slates of yellow sheets in the sand. Everything else is sand, if it’s not fields. 

He draws the necklace to his lips and mouths at its crevices, the hook of the arrow’s head smooth on his tongue. Dean nudges him, squeezes his bicep, and Sam knows he must be smiling.

Sam can’t understand how Dean is always so fucking calm when things go to shit. He feels like he’s found himself his very own queen-sized deathbed and he can’t help but lie in it for a little while, ex-fucking-cuse him for not being all sweet and saccharine about it. 

“Sam,” Dean coaxes, turns the radio down so low it’s just muffled warbling now. “Tell me about where we’re going again.”

“Chimayo. Santuario de Chimayo.”

“Chi-mayo? No way.”

Sam glares at him, short exhale of a huff. 

“Man,” Dean scoffs, “Yeah, whoever picked the name for that one must be a legend at pulling shit out of their ass. I mean, c’mon, really? What does that even mean?”

“It’s cause you say it like chim-i-o, you jerk, not mayo. And they take it very seriously, so just do me a favor and shut your damn mouth, at least where other people are present?”

Dean scruffs up the back of his neck with a scratch to his hairline, his face all screwed up like it gets when he’s thinking hard enough about something. 

“I guess I just don’t get it. This ain’t gonna do shit for you, you’re not sick are you, this isn’t cancer. And so, unless you’re on some Jesus bender I don’t know about, we have absolutely no reason for this trip other than for your… spiritual benefit, or whatever. 

“Dude. What’s with you and hating religious people so much?”

“They’re deliberately subjecting themselves to bullshit for the sake of their own… salvation, and all that crap! It’s like, at some point, you’ve gotta know it’s all a load of shit.”

Sam rolls his eyes, not nearly alert enough to be the cause of this conflict, never in the mood to talk religion with his brother. It’s never been worth getting in Dean’s way about things like this. 

When Sam doesn’t answer, Dean sniffs, raps his knuckles against the steering wheel. He sighs, deep and hollow like he’s been holding it in all day, probably just because Sam’s not giving him attention, and then slams his hand down on Sam’s knee, who jumps, already on edge. 

“But hey, this’ll still be fun, eh?”

He’s lit up and giddy, his face one, big, dopey smile. 

Sam squeezes his hands into fists. 

He feels fluttery, his core shaking leaves from trees inside his stomach lining. He thinks maybe, somewhere along the road, he’s done enough to deserve this, whatever this is, this evil inside of him. He feels like he’s wanted for murder, like they’re racing down this road like renegades down interstates, running from something but Sam doesn’t know what. 

There’s a girl in his head, all strung up and bloody when he saw her last, the vision growing murkier with every passing hour, and Sam’s not sure if it’s the kind of thing he’s supposed to tell Dean because it’s hard to tell when his brother will take things too seriously, or take them seriously at all. He tries to keep her in mind, though, focuses on it because if he’s right it might be useful, but there’s this plunging doubt in Sam where he’s pretty sure the girl is long past dead. 

“So, Sam. Humor me.”

“Hm?”

“What’s in Chimayo for you, anyway?”

Sam gives Dean a sour look, bold and twitchy like Dean’s said something to offend him somehow. Dean makes a wounded face and Sam is satisfied enough, continues.

“It’s a holy place.”

“And?”

“And so,” Sam continues, deadpan. “It’s supposed to be a place of miracles. People who come in on crutches, or with blindness, whatever it is? They walk out of there healed, supposedly.

Dean’s eyes go buggy. “What do you mean, “healed”?” That doesn’t just like… happen. You think it’s a demon deal, or something?”

Sam clenches his teeth, thinks not everything in their lives has to be so goddamn threatening. It’s the road or no sleep or the fact that they’re another day and no closer to putting their dad to rest but whatever it is, he could throttle his brother. 

“It’s in the dirt. S’what they say, at least.”

“What, holy dirt?” 

“Well, yeah. The dirt comes from the place of the crucifixion. You bottle some up and apply it to what you want healed. There are like, crutches all over the walls where people have left them to walk out on their own. It’s a really powerful place, said to be.”

Sam shrugs, picks at his nails. This isn’t something he can handle Dean tearing apart for the butt of his joke right now. 

“So you’re telling me,” Dean starts, bent over the wheel like he’s waiting for the punchline, but Sam won’t give it to him, stakes in his eyes and ready to spear Dean down. “I’m supposed to believe we just rub a little dirt on you, say a few words, and you’ll walk out of there without this… this demon sickness or whatever?”

Sam stiffens, a sharp flinch. Dean’s eyes flicker over him and then soften, reaching out to touch Sam with a gentle hand, because he knows, too far. Sam recoils. 

Dean’s gone far past bending the rules of “not talking about it” and now he’s got a name for it. Demon, Sam thinks. He thinks I’m infected by the demon. He’s pretty sure he’s going to be sick. 

It’s a two hour ride the rest of the way to Chimayo, and they spend it in muted quiet, Sam hurt and Dean just looking really sorry but Sam’s not ready to forgive him for that one. 

They skid into town with the car’s hood close to disintegrating, dry heat wearing near-holes into the paint where the light catches, and if they dropped water on it, it would steam up and fizzle out. Chimayo is higher still, above the mountains they’d just been on, and they’d had to drive at an upward angle just to get here, oaken crosses like billboards, high against the upper stratosphere of the afternoon sky. 

Sam gets out first, and when Dean goes to unbuckle, he throws up a hand to hold him back. 

“I can do this one on my own, Dean.”

“Sam-”

“It’s fine, Dean, I get it.”

It takes a lot for Sam to walk away from him like that, leaned over the seat with his head tipped up to look at Sam in the light through the open door, all silent and almost humiliated by the way his mouth is wrenched up like that. 

Sam leaves him with his shades on and the windows down, a cigarette in his mouth like the worst kind of bad-boy cliche.  
_______________

The church is glowing. 

It’s empty and it’s glowing and luminarias lit up the path to the archway and Sam feels it, this power here the locals talk about. 

Soft adobe structure and high painted window panes and it’s so bright it’s out of place out here, all humble landscape and desolate hovels of houses. A tourist attracting in the middle of the summer and there should be so many more people, should be all crowded pews with praying people and Sam expected a priest or something, he doesn’t know. 

The back room is where the dirt is, a small cave like crawlspace that Sam has to hunch to shove through, shoulders curled inward and now he understands. Small flocks of families all coiled around this skull-sized hole in the ground, a foot deep. 

There’s a woman crying over some baby teeth in her hand and she pours them into her tiny vial of dirt, shoulders racking. Sam watches her tack a picture up onto the wall of thousands of other faces, this one a little boy, no older than four or five. He feels a fresh understanding of what it is to lose and he presses his mouth into a thin line, stoops beside her with his own two vials.

They meet eyes and Sam nods at her, the reflection of himself in her eyes and she bows back, stands to go. 

He takes his own leave after two full vials are screwed shut and he’s dropped the last two dollars to his name in the donation box. 

Back in the car, Dean says nothing to him, a pact of tolerance between the two of them when Sam presses the bottles to his lips and mouths, “thank you” to him with striking honesty in his gaze. Dean shrugs, waves it away, it’s nothing. 

It passes through them as an unspoken promise not to speak of it again, one of the times Sam’s sure of their syncrisity, the two of them a single, separated soul.

And they head back the way they came.  
_______________

It’s Dean’s idea to sneak into the hot water springs - of course it is. 

They take the highway back from Albuquerque, where there are cars and people and anything else but the endless thrum of the engine alone. 

Days of sex and soot has masked in Dean all of the sweetness that Sam eats up so readily, and he knows he reeks too, doesn’t know why Dean keeps touching him, they’ve been out in the desert for days now. He finds himself longing for the crusty yellow shower basin at Lorraine’s little lodge - bare of a shower curtain and smelling like seaweed somehow, but better than this.  
Sometime past dusk, Dean pins his hand to Sam’s chest with the flat of his palm, grinning. His chapped lips are splitting and busted, and his lashes hang from tired eyes like the dead moths dangling from light fixtures. Sam has to snort, the way Dean holds onto him like Sam might think he’s talking to someone else unless he addresses him with “Sam” and puts a part of him against his brother. 

“You wanna go swimmin’?”

Sam gives him a considering look, somewhat stuck on staring at Dean. Those bottle-green, apple-pie eyes are trained on him, stuck on his mouth like he’s waiting for Sam’s yes. 

He’s expecting Dean to tell him he looks like hell. Shallow dips of red under his eyes and his hair is stuck to his scalp, greased up and crawling. His face is swollen with the altitude, always so fucking sensitive.

It never comes. Dean studies him a while, staunch look in his eyes that makes Sam smile back with heavy, lidded eyes. It infuriates him how easily Dean works his way back in. Dean is the only thing that surprises him anymore.

“Yeah, Dean.”

Dean blows out a shuddery breath, wild eyes a stark contrast to the paling exhaustion in his cheeks, and Sam realizes Dean hadn’t expected him to say yes, probably not after what happened at Chimayo. 

“Great, okay. So, I was thinking. It’s near the middle of the night. And right off the highway here…“ 

Dean scans the road, his pointer finger pressed against the dash like he’s tacking something down, and Sam watches, the corners of his lips turned up in a half-smile. Dean makes it easier, somehow. 

“There! See it, Sammy? Hot water springs, brother. What do you say?”

Sam balks. He does see them, giant, ugly billboard right in the middle of their dying sunset, swallowing it up without a care in the world with its ugly purple lettering and Sam reads the advertisement and his head falls. 

“Dean, we missed closing time by like, five hours.”  
Dean’s jaw sets, sharp angle to his tilted head, because, duh, Sam.

“Yeah, Sam. We don’t want anyone there when we break into the place.”

Sam groans. He should’ve known. 

Dean veers them off the road and they park the car across from the place, never too careful. Sam keeps his fists clenched and his head down all the way there, something about this making him torn. And Dean? Dean, a few yards ahead with his head up and fucking whistling, he’s been grinning since they’d shut the trunk. 

It’s useless ducking for the cameras anymore when Dean waltzes right through and goes around the back with Sam on his heels. 

“Relax, Sammy,” he’d cajoled him when Sam had tried to talk some sense, Dean’s free hand wrapped tight around the dip of his jaw, “They never check those anyway. And if we don’t leave any evidence behind to give them reason to…”

Sam had sighed, rising up to full height and shoving Dean’s towel in his hands, curly hair strung right up in front of his eyes, and he could hear Dean laughing at him as he skipped ahead.  
______________

The last time Sam had been swimming, it had been in the pool of a country club in New Hampshire. The whole place had been under remodeling, and so the pool was empty when Sam snuck in right after the plumber waltzed out. It was nothing like this place, with its old brittle paint job and mildew in the corners of the steps. There had been no lights, so Sam had had to fumble around just to find the exit, slipping on cracked concrete and falling over the handicap-accessible lift. 

This place is enormous. 

All outdoors and Sam has to peer at Dean’s silhouette in the fog and steam, his brother far ahead and leaping off of rocks to get to the best pools of water while Sam stumbles behind, cursing. There are trees back here, Sam is startled to find. Wide expanses of skinny little evergreens, poking up out of the rocks like wimpy little seadragons, and when Dean sees them, he whoops and waves, shouting, trees, Sam, real ones, and did you ever think you’d see ‘em again.

High above the highway and heat so dry it had dried Sam’s shirt stiff to his back, and here they are, putting miles between themselves and the something wicked after Sam, and he is buzzing with another hit of blinding love for his brother. 

They find a nice corner pool behind the entranceway, and Dean gets naked almost immediately. 

Moonlight starting to break through over the water and the breadth of Dean’s shoulders are buffed with mineral water and his hair is sticking straight up with the same stuff, bare stomach bumping up above the surface of the water every so often and for a while Sam just watches, doesn’t care to join him. 

“Goddamn,” he mutters, because Dean can’t hear him. 

He doesn’t know what the rest of the world sees in the people they fall in love with because they’re not Dean. Sam can’t comprehend what makes it worth it. 

“You gonna stand around playing lifeguard, or are you gonna let me rub you off under the water, baby brother?”

Sam fucking growls, low and territorial and he spins on his heels, rounds the other side of the spring and stands over his smartass brother, all stretches of wet skin and lazy smile. 

“I’ll show you lifeguard,” he snarls, plunging in beside his brother and pressing a clammy hand over Dean’s mouth. A single moan passes through the cracks in his fingers and he has to bit his own lip to get a grip so he can clutch at Dean’s hips and grind his crotch down on Dean’s, hard. 

The whole world is fucking spinning, and he’s got Dean pinned good and true, and his brother’s hands in his hair are gonna have him fucking undone. 

He’s hellbent and wholly intent on making his brother beg for it, get him back for being such a fucking dick earlier, but then Dean tugs just right and his mouth falls open, head tipped back, and Dean cackles, 

“Knew it.” 

And pulls his hair again, nimble fingers tunneling right through to his scalp and Sam fucking cants his hips, not even any time to blush.  
“Fucking knew it.”

It’s just about the time Sam gives in to it. 

They jack each other off under the pitious canopy of trees and Dean bucks up into Sam with his name a mantra on his lips, rocking up into the crook of his shoulder and Sam could die right there, wouldn’t make any difference to him. 

He’s pretty content to live the rest of his life with Dean, just driving and killing and fucking around and it doesn’t look like he’s gonna have to work very hard for that, and it makes him laugh, shaky and cool and rumbling against Dean’s soaked skin. 

“What’re you laughin’ at? Somethin’ on my face?”

Sam snickers, shakes his head once. “Mm. Just happy, I guess.”  
_______________

They leave nothing behind besides the drying memories of their footprints on the rocks, steamy and sated and dancing back to the car in just their boxers, towel wrapped snug around Sam’s head and Dean calls him a fucking girl for that one. 

Back at the car, Sam falls back against the hood, stretched out and laughing, and Dean circles him, works himself between his thighs to kiss him, heady and dirty and wet skin gone shivery and cold. 

They’re pale and barefoot and just off the highway and the whole world can see them and their dusty bare feet in the sand. 

Dean wrenches the towel from Sam’s head and it unwinds in a heap of black where it falls beside a wheel. Sam’s skin is alive, pricked up and pebbled and Dean just has to get his mouth on it, teeth to his chest. Sam’s gasping, hips bouncing up to meet Dean in the air, scrabbling for his back and chanting, “Yes, yes, yes.”

They kiss and they laugh and Sam can’t catch his breath, pulls his brother’s head away with both giant paws boxed around Dean’s ears. 

Dean blinks down at him, smirking. Sam’s eyes well up and sting behind his lids. 

“Dean.” He says, so much weight in one word.

“Hush,” Dean says, lips clipping the crook of Sam’s mouth. He tries again, lunging forward to angle Sam’s mouth right where he wants it and then pushes in deeper with his tongue, prying Sam’s lips apart.. “Hush.”

Sam doesn’t have much of a choice, there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No stopping on the highway girl  
> Because I want to burn my gas  
> There's one girl that I know I'm never gonna pass  
> She is my special  
> She is my special  
> She is my midnight, midnight yeah
> 
> -GVF


	6. Meet On the Ledge

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Purple skies and bloody girls and kissing in a tent. Also, something terrible comes to an end.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel like I should acknowledge this chapter being close to a week late. But hey, it's not for lack of trying. The last few scenes or so just never sat right with me and I spent like four of those days trying to make 'em work. Tragedy is hard. Hope it shows!

Dean’s flying through New Mexico like there’s a bounty on their heads, the road flashing white-grey-white under the tires and then the asphalt thins out and they run out of road, nothing left ahead but dirt and dust. So then he tears through the desert, and it’s all the same, everywhere he looks, no way to tell where they are besides the same rolling skyline. Dean knows the way best by the numbers on the odometer, anyway, can get them there driving backwards and blindfolded.

He’s so fucking livid he’s burning up, shaking with it, Sam in the passenger seat muttering apology after worthless apology but he has nothing to say to any of it, just tells Sam to shut the fuck up until they get there. 

Sam’s fucking hyperventilating over here and there’s not even any room for Dean to breathe, besides the fact that Sam is sucking up all of the oxygen, because Dean’s stupid, God, so fucking stupid. Little brother just tried to rocket himself out of the car when they had been coasting at a good ninety miles and Jesus, Sammy, were you trying to die, because you would’ve, mark my goddamn words. Dean crashes into his ribs with one hand clenched in his shirt, hollering at him to wise the fuck up and Sam’s just dry-heaving now. 

The clearing up ahead is enough to make a non-believer pray, and Dean would be falling to his knees right now if he weren’t standing on the gas. 

His brother goes to roll down the window, scrawny little shivering fingers that grasp for the crank but Dean yanks him back, slaps him across the face and tells him, “No you fucking don’t, get away from the window or so help me, Sam.”

Sam moans, breathing so hard he’s rattling with it, eyes so wide the whites go all the way around the iris. Dean could punch him right in the chest. 

It’s all so flat but there’s that old site again, coming right up in maybe ten feet or a mile, hard to tell out here, everything so flat, but Dean dives for it, car skidding across the dirt even as Sam reaches for him, hooks his hand around his hip and into his belt loops and tugs, begging for him but Dean doesn’t know for what, doesn’t want to hear it, either.Sam drops his head to the dashboard and twists to tilt up towards the sky, looking dangerously close to passing out and they’re a little far off, Dean would’ve liked to keep going, no use walking any more than they have to in this fucking heat but Sam’s not going to make it, and Dean’s not going to make him. 

The car slides forward even after he slams on the brakes, and they glide across the dust like skipping rocks. 

Rips the key out of the ignition and whips around to face Sam, hits him again, right across his cheek because he can’t even believe this one bit but Sam doesn’t even wince, doesn’t even meet Dean’s eye. Somehow that hurts worse.

“Christ, Sam. You better be fucking dying or something, because I swear to Jesus fuck.”

Sam slumps against the seat, wheezing, pale all over and eyes all flat and glassy, even when Dean forces his head around to look at him. 

It’s made worse by the fact that Sam just keeps trembling, rolling around in his own skin and rocking against the seats with his face all screwed up and Dean sighs, sucks in a breath that’s meant to calm his raging heart rate. He presses his brother to his forehead and winds their hands together because Sam is reaching for him and if that’s what it takes to get him to talk. 

Sam crushes Dean’s palm in the grip of his giant fucking mitts and Dean chokes, jolts the air right out of him. He spasms against Sam’s hold and looks down with wide eyes at his brother’s knees, pressed against his thigh. 

Sam is buzzing, no other word for the way his whole body hums with something horrifying, and somehow it’s worse for Dean to watch than his brother’s seizure in the sand, years ago, feels like. 

“Fucking… hell, Sam, what the hell is wrong with you?”

His brother whimpers, knocks his head into Dean’s collarbone, and he winces, tries to regulate but he knows Sam can feel his heartbeat racing ahead of his breathing, Sam’s mouth flush against his jugular. 

Dean gets a firm grip on Sam’s wrists and squeezes, hard. Sam’s fingernails dig into the meat of his thighs and Dean’s sure his brother is grinding his teeth down into dust by now. 

“Hey, Sam. Hey, you listen to me, okay? I’m gonna need you to tell me what to do, yeah? I can’t help you, f’you don’t talk.”

Dean gets the car door kicked open with one foot and it helps a little, lets some air in and that seems to calm Sam down, get his breathing ratcheted down to a good few gasps a minute.

Sam just keeps shaking, though, and Dean doesn’t have much of a choice, just goes where Sam asks, which is right against Sam’s chest apparently, hugging him close and his brother is all limbs, clawing at Dean’s back and pawing at his hair. Stubborn heat against his shoulder where Sam’s face is stuck fast to his throat, his cheek welting up and Dean can feel it, and he makes the mistake of looking Sam in the eye again. He finds that same pleading look on Sam’s face from the last time, the kind that says put me down or help me and Dean shatters, kinda snaps in half.

“Easy, Sammy, easy,” he murmurs, quaking hands that stroke Sam’s hair and lull him down but not as fast as Dean would like. 

Sam sobs, “Vision, ‘nother one.” 

And Dean nods, wide hands comforting on the back of Sam’s neck and he just holds him there awhile, doesn’t make a sound. It’s no surprise to Dean that he can be virtually no help to Sam like this, has no idea what the fuck is going on, let alone how to get through to Sam.

“You’re gonna hav’ta tell me about this one.”

Sam’s fists screw up into little jackhammers and he pounds at the seats, shaking his head, NO.

“Sam.” It’s meant to sound like an order, and the way Dean feels Sam stiffen, it comes across that way.

There’s a quiet kind of strain in Dean’s voice, this mangled drop in his tone that he hopes goes unnoticed, can’t afford to let Sam know he’s so het up about this whole goddamn thing because it’s Sam, and so the kid will take it the wrong way, think it’s his fault or something crazy like that. 

Sam’s eyes are cold, narrowed bands of blue-green around dilated pupils, and as if Dean didn’t know how his brother felt about it already. Dean rolls his eyes, throws his hands up in a wide ‘w’. He doesn’t know what his brother wants from him. 

“Baby.”

It’s a new approach, and it floors Sam so obviously, high little keen in the back of his throat and hands that clutch at Dean’s shoulders. Dean would laugh if he weren’t so sick with worry. But hey, note to self for later.

“You don’t tell me, how’re we s’posed to work this one out?”

Sam shudders, looks right through Dean with this blank stare, his legs bouncing against his own, and he’s finding it so hard not to flip the fuck out right about now. His voice stays gentle, soft stroke to Sam’s palm and a calculating look in his eye when he sweeps thick strands of hair from the bridge of his brother’s nose.

“Please, brother.”

Sam’s mouth twists up and he rips out of Dean’s grip, retching. Knees buckle and he throws himself out of the car, just misses the wheel’s rim and gets sick all over the sand, whole body bent over in pain. Dean winces, leans over the seat to get to the passenger door just to rub at Sam’s back, paw at it, drag his hair out of his eyes with as careful a touch as he can muster up right now, his whole body on fucking fire. 

There’s a muffled groan, and then a “Fuck,” from Sam, and Dean’s mouth spreads open in a smile but it’s a damn good thing Sam can’t see him right now, because it’s a cheap one, a fake. 

“Maybe you were right, little brother,” he chuckles, straining, heavy slap to Sam’s back and then a shake to his shoulder. Sam groans, whole spine contracting and he gags again, clutching his stomach. Dean pets him through it, shaking his head, but he’s sneering,

“Maybe it was a hangover, after all.”

Sam groans, draws the back of his hand across his mouth, then spits in the dirt. He kicks sand over his mess and hauls himself to his feet, dizzy with it and Dean has to fight the urge to help him do it. “Oh, fuck you.”

Dean smiles but there’s so much dread in it, and when he squeezes Sam’s neck one last time, something in him cracks a little.  
________________

Tent all set up and Sam was brushing his teeth when Dean asked him about it again. 

His arms snaking around to wrap around Sam’s waist, and Dean didn’t know what it was worth that this was supposed to be like an apology, some kind of testimony that he wasn’t gonna stop touching Sam after that.

Maybe it’s worse that he feels like he’s got to prove that to him now, but Sam takes it well, leans back into it like he was waiting for it, hard back pressed to Dean’s chest. 

He lets Dean lead him back to their tent, miraculously. Ten feet away but Sam doesn’t pull back, lets his brother steer him backwards in an awkward sort of shuffle to the flap of the tent opening. Somehow, Dean gets Sam down to the ground, like wrestling an alligator - a gigantic, willing alligator. 

They just miss the sunrise, mountains clinging to the light, whole mile-long stretches of clouds in all colors, the horizon blooming in orange. They’ve been up all night and it’s been a hundred-plus miles an hour since they got back home, so fucking ready to get this over with and they’re tired enough to sleep through the day, no objections. 

Dean digs his nose into the back of Sam’s neck, gets lost in his hair. He sinks his teeth just below, sucks against soft skin and sweat and Sam. He’s got one arm slung across Sam’s stomach, shirt off because it’s way too fucking hot to bother, but they’re getting used to that being the case, and Sam is holding it there, keeps it tight around him with a tight-knuckled grip. His cheeks are wet, and he knows Sam can feel it but there’s no use pretending anymore, total reckless abandon that comes with road tripping with your baby brother to your father’s burial site. 

He squeezes Sam, hard, whole body pressed to him. Sam hisses, stomach probably still protesting, but he kisses Dean’s palm, hot and wet in his hand and he swallows, it takes him a minute to get the words out, but Sam does, eventually, whispers, 

“I can tell you, now, I think.”

Dean doesn’t dare himself a breath, dip of his mouth quivering against the back of his brother’s skull. “Okay. Yeah, okay, Sam.”  
_______________

It had been the same dream again, Sam had told Dean, eventually. 

That girl, seventeen, she has to be, no younger, can’t be much older, strung up in the rafters. She’s impossibly bloody, and the way the drips have dried at her dangling ankle, Sam feels this sharp pang of panic drag its way up his spine because he knows. She’s long dead. 

He knows that anyway without the blood: the moonlit translucency of her eye sockets, the collapse of her wrists, frail in their roped restraints, the insects making their way down her face in streaks of blackened mobs of legs. Sam sees it all with tunnel vision, every inch of her highlighted in red. He can’t look away. No, he can’t look away. Something has him good and tight, his gaze fixed and bolted and he thrashes against it, some intrinsic instinct sending him lunging for her with all his might and then. It all goes black again.  
________________

“Listen to me, Sammy.”

Dean clings to his back, blinking in the filtered light of the sun through the mesh netting, and he doesn’t know what he means to say, goes silent all of a sudden.

Sam sniffs, lifts his hand to swipe snot from his nose, then cracks all of his knuckles in one go. His lips press into a hard line and he wears down on them with his teeth, tries to reign himself in a little but the heat is making him angry, testy. 

Lips bright red and swelling and he licks them subconsciously. “We’re gonna figure this one out. It’s just like any other case, yeah?”

Sam snorts. “Yeah, just like the rest,” he snarls, bitter taste in his tone, “Except, you know what that makes me, then.”

Something catches in Dean’s breath, makes him so nauseous he has to sit up, get out of some of this fucking heat, fifty foot plummet of his heart to his stomach.

“You- Shut your fucking mouth. I don’t want to hear you talk like that again, you hear me?”

Sam bristles, shoulders rise up like a barricade and he turns his face into his pillow, and Dean sees the crescent dents in his forearms where he’s clawed marks into himself, and he’s not really sure what to do right then. 

“You don’t get to tell me how to feel, Dean.”

That kind of rocks Dean’s whole word for a minute and so he sits back on his heels, blows out hard through his teeth and clenches his jaw. He’s sweating something fierce, everything he’s feeling made worse tenfold by their own little corner of hell that is this overheating tent, its tarp sticky and slick. 

He’s pretty sure he’s going crazy. 

“I’m telling you I know how you think, Sam, s’all.”

His voice goes soft at the edges and it comes out whinier than he likes, makes his cheeks hot. He’s tense all over, body like a bowstring.

“This doesn’t. This ain’t gonna… change things, you get that?”

Sam doesn’t move, harsh huff into the pillow. His hair spills out in all directions, big maps of sweaty curls, baby strands that blur against Dean’s vision. He blinks it away. 

“You get that or not, Sam?”

Slow nod from his brother, but Sam doesn’t look up. Dean could strangle him. 

“Hey. You’re not listening to me, brother.” 

He nudges Sam’s shoulder, cuffs it tight and rolls him over, and Sam’s eyes are webbed with streaks of red, bloodshot. He’s been crying, Dean realizes, numbly.

“All that shit Dad said?”

Sam cocks his head, stubborn kind of doubt written all over his face, and he looks kind of crazed with anger and something else.

“Fuck it all.” Dean says, pulling Sam up into his orbit until they’re breathing out of each other’s lungs. And then he kisses him, knocks himself on his ass with the force of it, Sam rising like the tide to meet him halfway, baby soft mouth tilted up and he just takes it, lets Dean take him apart. 

“Goddamn, Dean,” Sam gasps, and Dean smirks, hollows out his mouth and goes for Sam’s throat, sucks at it until there’s an angry mark of purpling red.

“I told you, Sam,” he growls, lurching up to tighten his fingers in Sam’s hair, get at his mouth again. Sam makes this strangled kind of moan, fingers diving into that caved little arch of Dean’s spine and he feels like he’s falling apart. “Long as you stick around, I’ll be here.”

Sam fucking keens, back arched to the heavens and his hands up Dean’s shirt, and Dean has to wind his fingers in Sam’s hair to pull him back to meet his gaze, panting something awful. “You and me, brother. All it takes.” 

Scritch of plastic and he finds his way back down to Sam, shocks him into the sheets again with a turn of his tongue into the flat of that fluttery chest, works his teeth into it until Sam’s writhing. 

Sam says, “Yeah, Dean, yeah,” so loose and pliant under his hands that Dean’s not sure what he’s supposed to do with all of this power, and they fall back into each other again.  
_________________

Sam staggers out of his sleeping bag and into the high noon sun well after Dean finished unloading the car and making them a skimpy lunch of their long-time nemesis, PB&J, but really, what else is there to eat out here, and Sam sneaks up on his brother, just barely, rolls his eyes at John’s cap twisted at an awkward tilt on Dean’s hand.

“Hey.” Strong hand on the small of Dean’s back and he presses, warm hands on warmer skin. Dean starts, just a reflex, but he crushes his sandwich in his hand, then curses, spins around to face him. 

Sam snickers, knocks their heads together and shuts Dean’s open, protesting mouth with a biting kiss.

Dean groans, PB&J hanging lame and limp from one hand but his other winding around Sam’s neck, bent angle of his elbow but fuck it because Dean’s mouth is searing and tastes like strawberry jelly and Sam can’t remember a time Dean’s kissed him this hard in his life. He’s pushing past his lips like he’s getting ready to crawl inside and it’s getting hard to stand on his own. It means something, and Sam has some idea of its significance, but none of that matters now. 

Teeth and tongue and Dean crashing into him, and Sam’s arms fold up around Dean’s neck, sinks to his level in this new way he has yet to get used to, their time apart measured in the inches he’s shot up over his brother. He feels like he’s levitating, huge gusts of Dean that could knock him down at any moment but don’t, raise him higher instead, with just the shape of that mouth and those hands at his throat. 

He loses time like that, thin air making his lungs hurt worse the longer he goes without coming up for more but it’s Dean and it’s so, so worth it. 

“Hey,” Dean says, finally, when he pulls away by barely an inch, bright eyes glittering, all Summer sun and dusty desire, freckles pooling high on his cheeks with his smile.

Sam just grins. 

Dean studies him a moment, searching for something but Sam has nothing to hide. 

“You doin’ okay?”

Sam shrugs, heat rash on his arms that he can’t stop picking at. He’s so fucking lucky he doesn’t peel, Dean says. He gives Dean a smile in offering, tips his head. 

“Considering? Yeah.”

Dean nods, clears his throat. He squints at Sam or at something behind Sam, it’s hard to tell. 

“Good. That’s real good.”

Sam laughs, shakes his head. There’s hair in his eyes again - perpetually, lately. 

“Yeah. Guess it is.” Then, “You think we should… get it over with?” 

He winces, knows how it sounds, but they’ve put it off long enough, almost a whole season between now and when John died, and if they don’t, and something else gets to the ashes before them-

Dean blinks a few times, chews on his lip. Sam follows his eye to the side where it bores a hole in the ground, bright and focused, magnifying glass on an ant hill. He’s smart enough to know when the tone has changed, or maybe he just knows his brother, but by the time he realizes what he’s done, it’s irreversible. 

“You mean, you wanna do this now?”

Sam stuffs his hands in his pockets, then yanks them out again, doesn’t know what he was thinking, as hot as it is. Dean’s got a lick of peanut butter on his cheek. Sam doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do with that, looks at Dean’s forehead when he talks instead.

“I mean, it’s about time, don’t you think? But I mean… up to you.”

Dean hisses, stormy look in his eyes. He looks about ten years older, right now. There’s a slump to his shoulders that wasn’t there before and his eyes soak faster than Sam would think, scenes of something tragic in that far-off gaze he’s got going on, no doubt. And his eyes, those look older every time Sam catches him at a time like this. 

A lifetime of this, and Sam’s brother is a veteran to pain - to losing people. It never gets any easier though, and it’s never the right time. 

Dean sighs, fans his hand through his hair and throws his sandwich into the air, for the crows. 

“Man. Our lives are fucked, kid.”

Sam laughs, a small nod. He’s long since been resigned to that fact.  
_________________

Sam meets Dean on the ledge just as the last of the pink skies dissolves into nothing. 

Dean’s smoking a cigarette, stark flare of fire hovering over his face. If he sees Sam coming, he doesn’t try to make him feel welcome. His back is to him, wide breadth of his shoulders stretching his old sleep shirt at the seams where he’s hunched over his knees in the desert. 

The first thing Sam notices after that is the icebox, all the way to the right, on the far side of Dean, plus the six-pack.

Fresh morning light and so the glare’s still too bad for Sam to be sure but there, a glint of silver, and he’s pretty sure it’s John’s old flask that Dean’s got in a death grip. 

Sam does a quick double-take because there’s a six pack of beer cans right beside him but Dean doesn’t look like he’s crying. Doesn’t look like has been, either. Still, if Sam had to guess, and he knows his brother best so it goes further than that, it’s not the time to sneak up on Dean. It’s probably not a good plan to leave him up here alone, though, and so Sam takes another approach altogether.

Sam says, “Hey,” once, their only real greeting, it seems, then twice, because Dean doesn’t look up. He kicks up a foot, careful, but it catches on a root and scuffs at the dirt, sends a thousand tiny pebbles skittering over the canyon ridge, a hundred feet, at least, and so much for quiet.

There’s no other reason for Dean to come out here other than to put John to rest, and the idea alone sends Sam’s heart slamming ahead at full speed, not even close to ready for this but it’ll never get easier and there will never be a good time but somehow that’s not enough of a reason and so he gets it, really, he does. 

Sam coughs, crooked little sidestep that leads him closer to Dean, not quite within arms’ reach but at least he’ll know he’s there. He rolls his head to the side, cracks his neck and scrubs a hand down the plane of it, crawling with sweat and grime and worry now too, thanks to Dean, because Sam had never been particularly close with his dad, not like Dean. Mary died, and Sam, he left, but Dean? John always had Dean.

________________

Sky high on the Hill of the Martyrs - at its highest peak, hanging over a wide expanse of dust and nothing else. Sam can’t get himself to feel anything. He thinks maybe that should scare him, should stir something inside of him, but it’s always been like that for Sam when it comes to John and so maybe it’s not so bizarre. 

Dean takes a swig and yes, there’s that old flask, and Sam had always wondered if that old thing would turn up in all of John’s shit in the trunk, and sure enough. A closer look and he’s got their dad’s journal too, spread open on the last page - John Winchester’s last known will and testament written all along the back cover and signed in thick, black ink. 

Sam hisses because this means Dean’s got it bad.

“S’funny, he wanted it to be here, dontcha think?”

Dean’s voice rings out over the canyon, a rush of noise in Sam’s temporal lobe, a shiver down his back. He smells like cigarettes and Sam breathes out through his nose, holds his breath until the air clears of smoke, turning against the wind. His boots scuff across the dirt, steel toes cooking his feet inside their socks.

“S’cause no evil would think to come here, in theory.”

Dean snorts, shake of his head. “Only now we know that’s not true. Follows us everywhere, Sammy.”

Sam stares ahead, feeling stagnant and empty, heavy against his own bones. There’s a crushing weight on his shoulders for what they’re about to do and he only wishes he could cry. 

“He wrote that a long time ago. It probably seemed safe enough at the time,” he sighs, suddenly so unsure of himself, a passerby on the long haul that was John’s whole life - most of which he’d only shared with Dean. 

Dean laughs, weak kind of wheezy, throaty sound punched out of him. “Lotta things were safe back then, f’you think. Like, Dad? Who woulda thought, y’know?”

It comes off nonchalant and Dean’s trying for Sam’s sake not to be a wreck for this, Sam knows, but it’s just the one thing he won’t let his brother push under the rug until it comes out on the job. Sam’s seen it before, all of Dean’s angsty, repressed bullshit making monsters and sometimes people pay, because Dean’s moral compass all but dissipates when his brain’s only halfway on the job. 

“It’s still what he would have wanted. Doesn’t mean we have to know why the hell he wanted it, but at least we have that.”

Dean tips his head up, squints at Sam in the light. “I don’t think that’s really our say. We’re not exactly the poster children for ‘what Dad would have wanted’.”

Shame comes to Sam like a stab to the back, stiff sheath of shock to his spine.  
“Nice, Dean.”

His brother just shrugs, claps his hands together in a cloud of dust, and rises to his feet, tired give to his shoulders making him look doll-like and collapsible, the illusion of half a foot of height between them, but Sam knows better.

“Think I’ll take a drink, f’you don’t mind,” Sam mutters weakly.

Dean snorts but he tilts his chin up like he gets it, tosses Sam a can of something cheap. It takes him a half a minute to down the thing and when he tears his mouth off of it, and Dean frowns, brow knit tight. Sam stares him down, daring him to say anything when he crinkles the can up, aluminum foil in his palm like it’s paperlight. Dean gives a low whistle and then takes a long drag from his smoke. It’s been a long while since Sam has seen his brother looking so fleshed out and lifeless, flat tone to his voice and stark look in his eyes. 

Another drag and then he offers it to Sam, green eyes burning in the smoke. He shakes his head, no. Sam doesn’t know why Dean bothers. It’s been so long since the rest stop and the way Dean’s been cleaning himself out, he’s probably down to one or two more. It’s a fucking miracle he can still breathe out here, this mountain air like breathing through slats in a vent, near impossible. 

His father’s journal is tilted up towards the sky, Dean’s thumb stroking across the raised ink absently but he’s looking at Sam, the book’s crumpled sheets of looseleaf sun drying to an aged yellow fade, motel sheets held tight in place with paper clips. Sam wants to snatch it from Dean, force it out of his hands and keep it from him until they’re done with this because there’s no telling how far Dean will go to forget about something - or someone - once they’re gone. 

Sharp glint of angled light against Dean’s sternum and Sam’s hand flies up to the pendant around the corded rope around his neck, twists it as Dean’s amulet dangles, windchime of bronzey metal hanging over his knees. This was always going to be hard but. 

“Holy shit,” he hisses, hard edge to his words and his fingers squeezing his throat into a choke with the rope. “Dad’s- We’re.”

He has no words left. He cuts himself off with a jagged squeak that shreds his windpipe, falls sideways into Dean and clutches at his shoulder like he might as well be the last ledge of a climbing wall. 

“Yeah, Sam. This is it.” 

Unmistakable shudder that passes through Dean tremors its way through their point of contact, and it circuits through to Sam’s shoulder. He gives Dean a look, but he twists away, goes for the box.

Dean opens it before Sam thinks he’s probably ready to, just seizes up the lid, throws his cigarette to the dirt . 

They’ve seen ashes before, nothing new there, but it’s all of their dad wrapped up in an ashy plastic ziploc and Sam’s not sure how he’s supposed to believe it all fit, but he doesn’t look too closely anyway, nauseous with it. He itched everywhere, whole back to the sun. He wanted to turn around and take Dean and get on the road, nothing but them and sundown but they’re stranded and this is something John wanted, and who was Sam to be selfish.

Dean won’t meet his eyes until Sam makes him, all choked up and shaking hands but he manages, slaps one hand on Dean’s shoulder, slides his other up his neck, his jaw, his cheek, back down again. Dean all but growls and Sam’s starting to worry he’s made the wrong call. 

“Sammy,” he says, all ruined and hoarse the only way their Dad got, sometimes Dean if he ever drank enough. “Please, can we. Just.” It means nothing but it’s an order Sam’s meant to follow somehow and he just nods lamely, gets his hands off Dean like he’s been branded.

One hand in the bag and it comes out sooty and spilling, heaping pile of grey on Dean’s palm. It pours out over the edges and sprays into the wind and Sam holds his breath because how fucked up would it be to inhale it and Dean turns to him expectantly, but Sam just swallows, doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do but stand here right now. 

Dean asks him, "You think we shoulda had something planned to say aloud?"

Sam runs his fingers through his hair, shakes it out just in case. There’s still ash everywhere, it mingles with the dust and it shouldn’t make Sam sick but somehow it does. 

“What, like a speech?"

Dean shrugs, nods. His teeth are wearing down on the inside of his cheek, Sam can see it in the squeeze of his jaw.

"I mean, do you-?” He gasps, forgetting to breathe and he has to step behind Dean, away from the wind and Christ, if Dean wouldn’t just stand there with his hands full like that, maybe Sam wouldn’t feel like crawling out of his fucking body right now. 

“If you want to."

Dean’s eyes fall to the flask, and Sam hands it to him like it’s his cue, face all twisted up in confusion but Dean doesn’t drink, just nods in thanks, big shaky breath out of him that Sam wasn’t supposed to hear.

Dean pours out the flask into the dirt with his one free hand, pitiful splosh of booze weathering a hole into the ground. He screws it closed with one hand, holds it to his chest and hands it back to Sam, doesn’t look him in the eye.

And then there’s this long, stony silence in which Sam doesn’t know where to look besides far out ahead. He feels like he’s intruding, somehow.

"Rest in paradise, you stupid, reckless, son of a bitch,” Dean mutters, all jammed up.

He goes to pour the rest into the sky, pulls his hand back down instead, blank stare like he’s forgotten something. His eyes glint dewy. 

"And. And I'm sorry. Sorry you didn't get to see the end of this. But we're gonna finish this. What you started. You got my word, y'hear? This isn't over until that demon bastard is-" 

He caves in, hunches forward with a sob.

Sam goes to him from the side, presses against his hip and clutches his waist like he's a toddler again. There’s nothing he’s supposed to say here, he knows. He just wraps Dean up in his arms, giant head on Dean’s shoulder where it barely fits and presses Dean’s head down by the back of his neck to rest against him.

Dean’s hand shakes and Sam just cups it in his, tips it slowly to the dirt, half moon tilt in the shadows and the ashes spill into the win, everything they’ve ever stood for in the wind. 

Dean stuffs his hand back in the bag, seizes up and shakes with his whole body, tosses out another handful and another, face all muddy where he’s tried to swipe at his eyes, and Sam just holds him, doesn’t cry. Dean picks up the whole bag and dumps it sideways across the breeze and Sam aches for his brother. 

Sam turns over the bottle of holy dirt in his palm, pulls it open with his teeth, mouth like a corkscrew, and tips it over the alcohol. He’s numb all over, constrictive air making his throat scream but his eyes stay dry. 

Above them, it starts to rain, because Dean is rarely ever wrong about these things. Giant thunder clouds with lightning strikes that never touch the ground and Sam can’t tear his eyes away, just clutches at Dean’s arm and stands with him until he stops fucking shaking. 

“This is it. Sam,” he says again. 

Purple skies and rain that evaporates halfway to Earth and Sam’s entire heart surges forward and he squeezes Dean’s hand, brings it up to press his lips to the back of his knuckles. Presses it to his own cheek. Something is free inside of Sam.

The entire sky wobbles, clouds sway with the force of it. 

“Yeah, Dean. It’s just me and you.” 

Total one-eighty and Dean turns on his axis, finds his way to Sam’s mouth and presses soft against his mouth. Sam’s throat closes off and he jerks, winds his arms around Dean so fast. Hot nose against his collar and Dean lets him hug him, fists wound in cotton, and if he cries, Sam doesn’t say anything at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The way is up along the road  
> The air is growing thin  
> Too many friends who tried  
> Blown off this mountain with the wind
> 
> -GVF


	7. Talk On The Street

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A bar, the car, a little sex.  
> Dean puts the past behind him in the best way.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am so sorry, I promise I didn't forget about this fic. This chapter took me a WEEK to get out and it's still my least favorite. I lost all interest in the car scene and it still sounds all wrong to me. I hope you'll accept it for what it is and forgive my absence AGAIN.

They make it to Colorado in no time at all, really. 

Daylight kicks up sun-specks of dust and dirt that sparkle against the windshield, catch on Dean’s eyes, kaleidoscopes. 

Sam’s trembling with too much caffeine and the bass guitar that’s killing the speakers, his boney knees bouncing in the carriage. He’s stretched out so far that he’s got the bench pushed back ‘till he’s filled up all of his leg room. He looks fucking sinful, all wide eyes and burning stare that works Dean up just the same as it scares the hell out of him. 

Those daisy-boy irises that could drag Dean back to hell with one look, then drag him back out again all in one go. Dean follows the smooth drop of his chin where his jaw’s filled out the gap from his chin to ear just perfectly, easiest place to kiss him that gets him all riled up. 

Sam is fucking radiant and sometimes Dean has to look away.  
__________________

The air is no better out here, so thin, an incessant raw burn that pinches their airways shut, no oxygen even when they’re gasping for it. 

The fog is new, though. 

All of the Rocky Mountains are melting sheets of snow caps into the atmosphere because Colorado is pushing 90º and the mountains can’t take the heat. That fog just sits there, heavy on Dean’s skin, and huge sheets of it cling low to the power lines, that dank kind of smell that mixes with the asphalt. 

Dean sends them hightailing to a bar in Colorado Springs to try to hustle a few big bills. Sam’s hoping for dense, macho motherfuckers with a dime or two to put down in a game of pool, and Dean’s just fixing for a drink.

They pull up out front and Dean gets the feel for it instantly, if the endless row of bikes don’t do it for him already.

It’s not the kind of place they’d ever find themselves in, otherwise. 

That same sickly sulfuric stench that comes with western public water supply systems, sometimes, and Sam notes that disclaimer on the door, the kind that “recommends” that their customers “choose” bottled water to avoid the rotten eggs taste of bacteria in their plumbing system. 

Dean’s all about that kind of thing, a twisted fascination with Western authenticity. It’s how they get caught up in these tourist traps to begin with. 

Really, the signs are everywhere. It’s all easily over-exaggerated cowboy props and imported cactus. It’s under-kept on purpose, haggard steps void of any kind of railings and a swinging saloon door to match. The windows are washed and freshly replaced, though, and judging by the looks of the seated customers, it has nothing to do with any rowdy customers. Plus, the floor looks about the same, polished and new, and so it’s pretty easy to tell it’s all played up. 

Dean swings right through those doors anyway, so fucking thrilled that the signs say he can smoke inside that he’s got one on his tongue before he gets his jacket off. 

High, boarded-up windows let a little high-noon light in, and the rest of the place is lit up with sparse shots of yellow light, burning from the oil lamps so intricately placed on an arbitrary cluster of tables. 

Dean has a couple of drinks right off the bat, sucking in a smoke every couple minutes or so because he has time to relax. Sam’s out looking for a crowd of guys for pool, round curve of his back over the chairs of a handful of strangers drinking under the fireplace, and Dean can tell just from the way Sam’s holding himself, making himself look all innocent and cocky that his brother has a crowd. 

A crook of a smile around his cigarette and he slouches over the bar, careful to watch out of the corner of his eye, but no one suspects they know each other, not by the careful way they saddled in one by one, Sam coming through the back minutes behind Dean. 

He calls for a whiskey and keeps his head low. He’s really just banking on Sam pulling through with some cash because if the tender asks him to pay his tab, he’s got nothing left to give her. 

Sam turns a corner for the pool table, stuck to a flock of rookie bikers and a Navajo man, and it looks promising, so Dean lets his pulse drop a little, swivel just enough to see what Sam is working with. 

Dean doesn’t come in until later, supposed to offer Sam a good-sized bet, but all they’ve got left to bargain is an antique watch so fake the gold coating chips with a thumbnail but no one’s meant to get that close to it if all goes well. 

He rises to his feet faster than his brain can catch up to, a dizzy spin on his vision that makes the tender raise a brow, hard eyes on him. Dean rolls his eyes, swats her away with his left hand and sprays ashes across the bar. She gives him a glare, opens her mouth to speak but he points at her to wait. Fumbling through his jacket he pulls out their emergency credit card - the least genuine of the bunch - and slaps it hard on the marble, gives her a smile. 

Her mouth slams shut, a thin line on her angry little face and suddenly Dean doesn’t have time for this. 

Slow saunter towards the group in the corner, the way they hover over the table with exact replicas of the same malicious little grins and Dean makes his way over, distancing himself. He wants to throw them all down over the billiard cloth. And Sam? Sam looks calm like the dying wind. 

Sam’s not playing up the drunken act, which, okay, weird. Dean’s used to that one, it’s rare to fail, almost unheard of in that regard. 

He plays like a blushing fool, knocking over the cues every so often and stuttering when one of the guys makes conversation. His lame wrist is caught at an awkward angle on the stick but he holds himself high in every other way. He knows how to sell it, that anxious twinge of his eyelids when he knocks a ball off course, tense line of his shoulders that’s so not Sam at all.  
Dean’s fascinated by the set edge to Sam’s jaw, that determined look in his eye like he’s really trying, never done this before, and it’s how he knows they’re well off.

“How’s it goin’, boys? You cuttin’ this kid some slack, I hope?” Swift western accent at the end, slur in his words that makes Sam’s mouth curl up in a way that Dean doesn’t miss, but that no one else catches.

Dean works his way in between this one guy and what’s probably his wife, if Dean’s not too drunk to make that kind of assumption. They give him this worn-down, ugly little smile and Dean sees black on their gums, the kind that comes from chewing tobacco and probably no toothpaste, ever. 

“You know this guy?” The first one asks his girl, probably his girl, Dean reminds himself. 

One look up shows Dean that everyone but Sam’s got their eyes on him, then back at Sam, and his little brother, genius that he is, cocks his pretty little head, looks so genuinely confused. 

“No, can’t say we know each other,” he frowns, high arch on his forehead where he’s squinting at them like he actually cares what they think of him. 

“You tellin’ me we get two newcomers on the same day, same time? In a town like this? You take us for a fool, buddy?”

The big one turns towards Dean, giant ring in his nose that could probably block his airways with just the weight of it, and Dean has to hide his smile, just barely does it, too. Hands up high as he stumbles back, eying all exits just in case and baby brother has lined himself up with the back door so perfectly Dean’s heart catches on his ribs for a second. 

“Hey, man,” he says slow, a solid, practiced drawl to his tongue laid on a little thick that makes the crew simmer down a little, mostly because Sam hadn’t come in speaking like that. “I’m just passin’ through. You want me gone, I’m gone.”

He stumbles back a little, sidestep to his walk like he can’t handle his liquor and it catches in the eye of Mr. Big Guy. 

“You can play?” 

Dean shrugs. “Better ‘an this guy, I’m guessing.” He nods towards Sam.

“And as long as you’re better than the worst guy, right?”

They let him in, up next behind the first dude, and he plays Sam the first round, knocks Sam right out of the park, and that just racks the stakes up higher, and suddenly everyone’s taking his brother’s bets. 

“Naw, naw, I don’t trust this guy, man! Lemme try again, play against someone else. That was a fluke, I swear,” 

Sam sounds so bloody sure of himself that Dean lets out a low whistle, and he can feel Sam looking at him but he doesn’t return it, just looks towards the men. 

“Think we should give him another shot?”

“C’mon, I’ll put two-hundred down right now for the win,” 

Sam’s pleading, now, and then everyone’s on board, shaking their heads and someone whispers, “amuteur”, and Dean almost can’t hide his laugh. 

Sam loses the next round, loses money they really don’t have, doesn’t know where he got it besides another match, probably, but Dean wins it back the next one. They go back and forth like that, and Dean’s eye keeps catching on the smooth scheme Sam’s got going on that’s got all of his opponents looking mighty pissed by the last few plays, and Dean’s got to hand it to him.

He surveys the crooked grimaces of the last few players, the angry way they make eyes at each other like they don’t dare accuse because they’ve got nothing to go on, Sam’s just that good at hustling. 

“Alright, fellas, I’m out. Knock him off his high horse for me, will ya?” Dean says once Sam knocks him out of the park fair and square. He hands over five-hundred to his kid brother, tries to look real broken up about it, and it must be believable because there’s an odd kind of sympathy that passes through the rest when he ducks out. 

He leaves just as the waitress comes in with his credit card, greets her with a tip of his imaginary hat, then high-tails it out of there. 

Sam comes bursting out long after with a bruised lip and his wrist all fucked up again, one knuckle busting through its seams. Dean swings his door open for him and climbs over the seats to make room for his brother, and there’s guys streaming out after them, cursing and hollering, but Sam’s pockets are packed full of cash, and so as soon as Sam gets in and they gun it out of there, Dean’s laughing. 

There’s a gang of bikes behind them and some angry motherfuckers who want their money back but Dean loses them when he ducks into the opposite lane and flies over an island, sends them rocketing past a red light and Sam’s smiling, telling him to “pipe the fuck down,” because it’s favorite thing to say these days. 

They crash through town and make it out of there just fine, and Dean calls him stupid and reckless and anything else he can think of for the way Sam’s face looks, all mangled with bruises, stiff slice in his cheek that looks like it hurts. 

“Twenty-five-hundred, Dean,” Sam grins, his hair all thick and wild where it winds and whirls out the window. Dean winks at him, the soft dip of his shoulders where he’s got his head halfway out the window, resting on his forearms even as the car bounces across potholes and speed bumps, going eighty in a fifty because they’re so close to the rest of their lives. 

Something about being on the open road again and nowhere to be besides the fact that it was Sam’s idea to start heading North again makes Dean fidgety and erratic, and Sam keeps rubbing at his thigh, tries to work him down but if anything it just makes it worse. ________________

“Dean,” Sam says, cool and cautious like he’s talking him off of the edge, or onto it, depending on how he chooses to look at it. “Pull over.” 

They’re on the freeway and Sam just pissed half an hour ago and their exit isn’t for another hour. 

“Why?” Dean asks, voice hollowed out from nicotine and humming along. It sounds dull and lame and he clears his throat unconsciously. 

“Now,” Sam says, sharp. 

Dean whips his head around, soft smirk because he knows that boiled over look Sam’s sporting, eyes on the road or otherwise. 

He whips them off of the road so fast that Sam’s slammed into the door, up to his armpit out the window. 

Dean has Sam fixed to the cushions, his sweaty back sticking to the leather where Dean got his shirt rucked up to his ribcage. 

He’s kind of going crazy, this enigmatic static snagging on the most lucid parts of his conscious mind and it’s maddening, because Sam is everywhere and all around him and when his hands make contact they thrum to life, greedy and determined and catching on the narrowest parts of Sam.

He wants to wrap his mouth around Sam’s hipbone and draw blood, flush him out until he purges the wicked out of him. 

It’s easy to forget the rest when he’s got Sam like this, all strung-out in his backseat with his hands in Dean’s hair and those numbing hazel eyes gaping at him with more pupil than iris, pretty pink mouth hung open as Dean sucks him down, and he thinks, this is filthy, or it should be anyway, but Sam. 

Sam’s got this calm about him that Dean hasn’t seen in his brother since before fire, and it shouldn’t make everything alright but it does, and Dean thinks, he’s never wanted to give up everything all at once quite like this. 

On the side of the road with his jeans tight around his hips where he’s straining against the zipper, bent over the seats. But that doesn’t stop him, not when Sam’s got ivory skin all spread out and glistening where Dean’s marked him up, no pants and no fucking shame to be seen. He’s just moaning and writhing, tightens his grip, trigger-ready whenever Dean gets his wits about him enough to stop staring and start sucking him off again. 

He can’t look up through his lashes, not with the intensity of the sun, and especially not with that look in Sam’s eyes and so it’s not even worth trying. 

Sam’s hands land tear-jerkingly hard against the back of Dean’s skull and paw him up his stomach by the back of his neck, pull Dean down to his open lips, all tangerine smile and bright baby sunset eyes, the kind that flare out to bounce light off his lashes.

Dean kisses him then, and it’s hard to stop after that. 

He tastes the alcohol on the backs of Sam’s teeth, the copper tang of his upper lip where Dean collapsed on top of it, battered up and swelling just the way Dean likes. 

Hands in Sam’s hair, right at the base of that skull that makes him shiver and whine, all wrecked out and maybe he’s always had a kink for it but Dean’s just figuring out the use for it now, pulls Sam back so he can get at his throat, mouth along the…

Oh.

Heart stops with his mouth as his eyes flick over it, that delicate little pen stroke in ink, Dean’s name branded on Sam and it makes him nauseous, sick with love and disbelief, mostly disbelief. Sam sees it, grins something fucking evil.

“This is yours, Dean,” Sam moans, grinds his teeth and sounds so pained that Dean could actually believe him, if his ears would get their shit together, process anything other than the blood rushing in and out, every blood vessel constricting. He needs a fucking oxygen tank. 

“This body? All yours, brother.”

That does it in and of itself, but it’s not enough for Dean. He kind of falls against Sam’s clavicle, cheekbone clipping hard bone and Sam lets out a hiss before Dean’s mouth even latches onto it. Sting in his cheek but he runs his tongue over searing skin, over his name, goddamnit. And really he can’t handle this now, feeling so flagrantly undeserving, and he’s got no way to give back to Sam, not after something like this, this means so much, makes everything else slot back into place and Dean only has one thing left to offer.

“Wanna fuck you.”

Sam laughs, chokes up a little and gives Dean a pitying little sigh, propped all up on his elbows, and Dean’s laid out on top of him like it’s his rightful place, staring up at him, stunned look on his face that he can’t wipe off or keep hidden.

“Thought that we were waiting for that.”

Dean shakes his head, violently, almost too fast but Sam doesn’t notice. “No. No.”

It dawns on Sam, and he tilts his head up, sly smile that spreads as wide as his dimples will let it, and he laughs, deep and long and so fucking hot. 

“You want me to bottom. ‘Cause you wanna wait. Something about you needing time. S’that right?”

Dean has to reign himself back in to keep from punching Sam square across the face, all disoriented because this wasn’t how this was gonna go, he’d never seen this coming. He swallows something viscous that goes down backwards and he spits just shy of the windowsill, bares his teeth at his brother.

“That’s about right. You objectin’ to that?”

Sam smiles at him, but there’s this untapped disdain that shows itself like pity, Sam’s teeth the whitest canvas on the slyest mouth.

“Yeah, actually.”

He’s so fucking hard underneath him, Dean’s mouth like a faucet and he has to swallow in big gasps to get it under control, wants to fold so bad, let Sam have what he wants, but.

“That’s somethin’ you earn, Sammy-boy,” he says instead, just shy of taunting but he means it all the same. All that does is provoke Sam, though. Dean’s mid-blink by the time he sits up for leverage and slams Dean against the back of the seat. His head flies back, spikes of white behind his eyes where it connects with the roof. Sam’s hands drive up into his chest and hover over his stomach, possessed look of fascination that passes over his eyes before it flickers out again. Dean’s eyes go wide long before Sam fucking giggles, the sick freak, suddenly twelve years old again.

“Yeah? What does that entail?”

Sam has his knees crooked right up on either side of Dean’s hips, got him right pinned, and the seatbelt is branding the bend of his elbow in a way that makes Dean hiss,

“Sam.”

It gets too hot all at once, and there’s still so much left unfixed. But Sam is right here, all of him, limited, now-or-never offer that has Dean groaning in the back of his throat, feeling so wrecked it hurts. 

They fit snug and seamless, airtight like Dean’s back molars, and he retracts, the kind of shock that fakes him out, shuts him down for a minute. Sam’s hands find his throat somewhere along the way and it notches everything up sky-high. 

All systems fail when that hand fits itself flat over Dean’s mouth, solid, plated palm that just won’t let up, and his eyes pop wide, scrabbling for Sam’s shirt, because that thing should be off, his greater instincts flooding from him because Christ, it’s been a while. 

Sam runs hot - he always has. He touches Dean where he shivers, hands that jump away when Dean gets jittery but that come back to try again, curiouser. He’s got red lips and cheeks in the dimming light, dark clouds that make his lashes look like shadow puppets. Dean wants to drag his mouth across it, skin like cinnamon. 

“Heh. You remember that first time, Deano?”

It’s a disgusting nickname, dirty and wrong because it’s on Sam’s tongue, no use for it other than from John when he’d been a kid and had maybe done something worth being recognized for. 

Still it comes to Dean without an afterthought, that first time Sam had woken up and found Dean on top of him, writhing and panting and just in his boxers, and Sam had gotten his hands right under that shirt and felt him up while Dean rubbed one out on his stomach. 

“Yeah, o’course,” he grunts, green eyes bold. “What’re you gettin’ at?”

“C’mon, brother,” Sam smirks, all lust and omnipotent power because Dean swears, the kid knows what it does to him to see Sam go all demanding on him. “Show me what you got.”

A little jolt of his head to the side and then Sam’s lap is opening up, spread out across from him with these open palms like Dean’s just supposed to say “hell, yes”.

“Hell, no.”

Sam laughs at him, goes for his wrists. They strap him up against him, reel him in by the heat of Sam’s gaze, and suddenly he’s stumbling across the seats on his knees, leather burning at only the most virgin gashes but Dean doesn’t notice.

He’s climbing right on top of Sam, clumsy, reckless, and groaning and at one point or another every limb has touched the roof by the time he gets there.

“We’re way too big for this, Sammy.”

Sam’s a devil in Dean’s Black Sabbath t-shirt, taunting him. “I am. You’ve still got a ways to go.”

Dean’s a bottle rocket, short fuse that launches him off of the cushion and sends him hurling towards Sam, easy roll to his hips.

“Oh, yeah? Show me what you got, big boy.”

Sam snorts, “Big guy? It’s no wonder the guys are throwing themselves at you.”  
_________________

Total world domination starts with the pulse in Sam’s hands on Dean’s hips, tremoring right here against his pelvic bone. 

Sam is deep enough inside of him to feel the collapse of Dean’s lungs, he’s sure. The tight grip of Sam’s grip on his wrists, noosing them up above his head, and he’s got a flash of hangman gallows. The cold point of Sam’s nose in his neck and his whole body goes hot-cold-hot all at once. 

It’s not the right time but it’s as good as any and so Dean is crying into Sam’s hair, everything aching in the dullest kind of hurt. He thinks of plastic handcuffs and kinky things and tries not to be so goddamn wrapped up in his head but it’s too late, the banjo pluck of Sam’s fingers slowing their strum on the puddle that Dean’s belly has become.

“Hey, Dean, hey.”

Palms in his brother’s hands and he’s being stared at with way too much heat and emotion and that just makes it dozen times worse so he goes to kiss him, swallows Sam’s tongue so they don’t have to talk about it. 

Sam’s protest is a muffled hum that falls down Dean’s throat, and he has to push him off to get a word out, steadies their hips so Dean stops fucking bucking, and what do you know, he hadn’t even noticed. 

“Stop, you fucker, settle down, and- and tell me, Dean, or I swear to God, do you need to- ‘Cause we can stop.”

“No, no, Sam, c’mon, let it go, I don’t know, it’s just a lot, it’s just a lot.”

Dean can count on one hand all of the times he’s cried during sex and at this rate, they’re all gonna be like the rest - with Sam, and he really didn’t need to rack anymore up on that list because his brother probably thinks he’s some kind of maniac. But Sam just pulls him tight to him, squeezes his thighs right over the muddled yellow bruises he got from God knows.

“You need to stop, we need to.” Sam sounds all torn up inside, hijacked by guilt and when he goes for Dean’s hips again, tries to get him off of him, Dean fucking growls, so sick of this. 

“Why, ‘Cause you want to?”

It’s a challenge. Sam doesn’t miss a beat.

“‘Cause if we don’t and I do something stupid and you get all butthurt about it, I don’t want to be left in the dust again.”

It’s a good excuse, Dean will give him that much. Only that much, though.

“Dude,” he bugs out, stray tear splashing on his collarbone, “Did you just make an anal joke?”  
Sam’s fingers curl up in a clamshell hold of vexation and he’s looking all worked up with his mouth hung open and Dean laughs, a shaky sound that barely sounds believable, and starts again to rock his hips. Sam’s big, too big, even, always has been. It’s a learned skill just to breathe when he’s got Dean like that, let alone talk, but he always manages, somehow and just barely. 

“Sam, baby, sugarplum,” Dean’s brother glares. “If you don’t screw me, right now, we’re gonna have more problems than we started with.”

It’s a ruse that isn’t supposed to work but the way Sam’s arms come up and around to lock behind Dean’s shoulders has him gasping, dangerous even to speak because he doesn’t want to push it, can’t think anymore about it, and then this big black hole of Sam comes and swallows him up before he can try. 

“You tell me right now. You tell me you don’t want this and I’ll get up and we’ll never try again, not if you don’t want, but you tell me, Dean.”

Sharp nails through Sam’s hair, just enough to give him blurry spots behind his eyes, and Dean shoves him forward in a blink, cuts right to the chase and kisses his brother hard enough that he hopes it’ll stick.

“Just… go slow, y’hear me? I said I wanted time, and part of that comes from the length of your fucking… monster dick, Sam.”

He gets what he’s after when Sam sputters on a laugh, his face lifted a little and his head knocked right back where Dean’s got his hair all wound up in his hands, and he grins back, goes in for another kiss. 

Sam’s mouth moves slow, teasing but mostly testing, drawbridge drop to his jaw when he lets Dean in little by little. He coaxes his tongue right between Dean’s lips, smooth flick of his tongue that has him dizzy and shivering.

“S’just like you to tell me I have a monster dick when you consent.”

Dean twists that necklace up in one fist and drops himself down just to get a taste of that mouth. 

“Don’t make it complicated.”

Sam rolls his eyes. “Right, ‘cause you’re so simple.” 

Dean beams, and the crying’s stopped and it’s so much easier this way, when he can just deal with it later, when they’ve both got no other choice but to figure out but to do that later, after. He feels self-destructive, lethal, but there’s no way he’s going back now, no point, and with Sam like this, it’s not something he’d trade for his life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Everyone knows  
> That's there's talking on the streets  
> Remember the days  
> When there's no one to defeat  
> Follow me down  
> To the mountain of the sun  
> Forgetting the end  
> As your new life has begun
> 
> \- GVF


	8. Black Smoke Rising

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam hallucinates and Dean's in deep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know this chapter is short but I graduate high school this week and if I didn't get it out now I knew I wouldn't! But hey, I'm thinking about making this a series!

The aftermath leaves Sam and Dean in the back lot of an inn, stranded with no gas and a heatwave that just won’t quit. They have nowhere to be and there’s nothing holding them back and all they’re doing is running from whatever Sam has got going on with his friggin’ visions or whatever, and Dean convinced him pretty easily that now was a pretty good time to drop off for the rest of the day. He’s beat, emotionally and physically, his knees all kinked from the constant bend at the wheel.

Sam has a mouth like cherry cough syrup, glossy and glimmering and kiss-bitten just the way Dean likes, and he watches it slick with spit while Sam talks, wants to run his thumb along it. The headlights are buzzing but Dean won’t look away, can never stop looking at his brother, and so they stay on because he doesn’t shut them off.

They’re parked with the hood towards the exit sign, the trunk riding right up against the curb so they can just unpack and get on with it, slip in and out without the owner getting in on it, because they have the cash but it shouldn’t be for this, Dean thinks. They can’t always hustle their way across America and sometimes it’s better to save it for the worst of times.

Sam gives him an odd little glance, glint of an eye in the dirty skyline that turns Dean’s neck blotchy and his ears red. Then there’s this freakish instant where Sam fits his fingers inside of Dean’s collar, twists a little under the leather cord that the amulet hangs from. 

Dean doesn’t even swallow. His jaw twitches and he clings to the wheel but his wrists are slackening the more Sam stares. He’s still not used to this, this constant thing that they’ve become that doesn’t really have a start-up point. He’s never really sure what’s acceptable unless Sam makes the move. 

Dean gets a glimpse of himself in the rearview mirror. His hair is an ashen mat of dirt and sweat, this sour look on his face that he just can’t wipe, that has never really gone away. He’s got a split lip and a hickey below his ear. And when he darts his eyes away, mouth a hard line, Sam is glowy and simpering.

There’s about a foot of space between them where Dean’s kept his careful distance on the drive, didn’t want to push but wanted to touch, God, so bad.

“We, um.” His eyes close against the glaring light of the neon vacancy sign, tangerine sliver of color that advertises FREE AC and HBO and WI-FI.

Sam keeps his eyes low, just nods once. “I know, Dean.”

Dean wraps an arm around the seat but Sam doesn’t come any closer. He keeps fidgeting, wants Sam to say something, seal this doubt between them but there’s nothing.

They’re travel-worn and beat down by the sun and when Sam’s hand slips from his collar, Dean’s pulse throbs in his throat. He’s so fucking dehydrated but there’s a sweat that breaks out over his skin in a sheet of shine, and Dean thinks it must be time for a drink but he doesn’t know where they go from here and the hatred for the indefinity between them hits him blunt-force.

Sam goes out to sit on the hood. Dean unpacks what they need and leaves the rest in the trunk for a quick getaway. He spends most of his time between trips staring at Sam’s back. 

There’s a stolen moment where Sam looks back at him and just grins, a poltergeist in the parking lot. 

Dean turns his eyes away, soft kind of smirk pulled right from his pink mouth, on top of the world and chilled all of the way through. 

They drag the beds together and Sam pelts him with his jeans for leaving his socks on the counter. Dean scratches his stubby nails over the dried blood on Sam’s collarbone, under his nose. Sam bruises his throat with the force of his mouth and they fall against the beds and drink until they lose their footing. 

Dean crushes his nose into Sam’s hair and Sam goes for the remote, laughing and squawking and then Dean murmurs, “I’m dyin’ for a shower. You comin’?”

Sam gasps, thinnest rings of blue-yellow-green around the black of his blown pupils, and Dean’s heart breaks free of his chest. 

“Uh, I uh. I don’t think I’ve got it in me,” his brother laughs, leans back into Dean. There’s a heady scent of booze and blood and Sam’s favorite cinnamon gum and Dean is digging his own grave with this kid.

“You gonna be good out here by yourself? Won’t find you ODing on the floor, if I’m gone for more than five minutes?”

He traces Sam’s D.W. and breathes out against the epic scent of Sam. Presses his thumb flat into the crease of a dimple. The sun has long past set.

Sam croaks, his voice half gone by sleep, “I think I’m gonna pass out. Killer headache, dude.”

“Fuckin’ lightweight, is what you are.” Dean shakes his head. His hands feel slippy and wet, cold to the touch. The bathroom feels so far away. Kiss to Sam’s forehead and then he tears away, buzzed enough for the lights to swim but not enough to forget the look in Sam’s eyes, that drifty touch to his cheek.  
___________________

Sam has no idea who Dean is when he steps out of the steam, towel straining where it’s wrapped around his waist.

Light comes pouring in over the bedspread when Dean swings through and goes for his duffel, and Sam’s not there. 

Dean’s flayed alive by the sight of the empty room. 

A band of orange light, thin as a windowpane trails over the sheets and then Sam rises up from behind the bed, like Sam could hear his little internal invocation, a prayer. Dean goes to smile, this urge he gets sometimes when he wants Sam oblivious to something. Then he turns his head and he’s got his eyes so wide and terrified that Dean flinches, feels betrayed somehow. It’s a look mostly saved for poltergeists and demon reckonings and Dean’s never seen it aimed at him. 

There’s something else in Sam’s head when he looks up at him, that panicked paralysis that locks him to the bed and Dean wants to run to him but his brother has his hand wrapped impossibly tight around Dean’s gun, just enough to hold him back. 

He says Sam’s name slow, a promise, a mantra, if not out loud than in his own heartbeat.  
Sam says nothing, shadows that draw his face down into this grotesque mask of horror, and he shrinks back against the foot of the bed. He’s bent over so the line of his shoulders supersedes the drop of his head, hanging hair in his eyes but he looks wild, trembly and stiff. 

Dean calls to him six more times before he even gets Sam to look up again, and the boy looks good-and-truly scared, all shook up and staring right through him and Dean doesn’t know how he knows it but this isn’t Sam’s average demonic vision this time. 

“Sam,” Dean says, careful. He doesn’t touch at first, doesn’t know what Sam is seeing behind his eyes. 

Sam is still stuck, his eyelids pinned back and his glassy stare on the back of the room, even when Dean stands in the way of it, and something inside of him not far from dread tells him what this is. He’s too close, knows he is, but he has to because it’s Sam.

There’s a sharp gasp like he’s drowning and then Sam rocks back, runs a hand down his face and he looks so pained that Dean’s struck with a sudden fit of uncertainty, doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do besides what he’s always done, and he scrambles for Sam’s hand, the one that’s, for a moment, off the gun.

He pulls it to his chest, stands between Sam’s legs and says something that gets drowned out by Sam’s ragged breathing and the rush of blood in his own ears. 

Sam looks away, turns his head around, a quick 180º like he’s being cornered. 

He’s freaking out, rolling his neck and standing up just to rock back and forth on his heels and Dean just can’t ground him. He’s got a thick band of worry across his forehead, eyebrows at an upward tilt. 

Dean has never been so afraid of his brother in his life. He thinks back to that headache, that “killer hangover” he’d figured Sam had and his heart wrenches. 

“Sam? Sam!”

Sam tears away to go towards the window, peers outside and then his eyes go wide. He ducks beside the radiator, squeezes his eyes shut and does this fluttery thing with his hands until they settle and wrap around the gun, chrysalis tight where he’s curled into the corner.

There’s a deep kind of fever that flows through him, and he’s paled, aged ten years in ten minutes and Dean isn’t sure of what the fuck is going on but Sam is hallucinating, that much is for sure. 

He’s pounding heavy fists on his bent knees, eyes so tight Dean cringes. He keeps scratching at his face too, like there’s something Dean’s missing and he’s not quite sure how he’s supposed to get his brother back from something like this because it’s nothing like the rest.

Dean comes closer, says his name one more time and then Sam screams, slaps both hands over his eyes to shutter them, clawing at his own throat, hysteria.

John would slap Sam. Their dad would take the rational approach, try to distract Sam with some other kind of pain, ground him with the back of his palm but Dean can’t do that, doesn’t have it in him and he wonders if Sam’s weakened him somehow. 

The lights flicker and flash and then go out. It’s all Sam. 

Dean knows that now, with all the power his brother’s wielding, he has some idea. He’s braced himself for the extent of it for months now, but it all comes crashing when all of Sam’s fucking energy shorts the circuits. 

Something thuds to the asphalt outside and Dean goes to take a look, tries to get between Sam and the window, but the fog has thickened, smothering the streets now and it smells like rot - like spoiled eggs.

There’s a body in the road when the lights flicker on again, and Dean puts one fist in his mouth, throat raw and wrecked.

“Sammy,” he squeaks, startling himself, “What have you done?”

Sam just whimpers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And the black smoke rises  
> From the fires we've been told  
> It's the new age crisis  
> And we will stand up in the cold  
> Stand up in the cold
> 
> -GVF


	9. Everything's All Right

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Something's coming. Sam and Dean are ready for it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I ended up making this its own work but then decided it would work better as a continued piece.   
> Thanks for reading!

Something’s coming. Sam and Dean are hurtling through Colorado in the opposite direction. 

The storm that’s coming is way ahead of its time, a sudden downpour that peppers the hood with streaks of liquid lead. The Impala weaves in and out of the passing lane, spazzing out in the inch of rain on the tar, a losing battle. Dean is hunched over the wheel, slams his palm down on the wheel every so often because he loses control, has to coast for a little while before he can get a good look at the road again. And the fog, it’s impenetrable. 

It’s so much better than the dry heat and if it weren’t for this random burst of humidity Sam might even say he could breathe a little better, however psychosomatic it would seem.

A bright blue destination sign whips by, and Sam catches a glimpse of the word “Lodge” and a couple clips of pictures, but there’s no way with the speed they’re going he could even try to make any sense of them. 

Sam is lying against the backseats at an awkward slant, and his brain feels beat down, convulsing against the walls of his skull. He’s so damn exhausted, staring out of this window where all of the colors blend into one offensive tinge of sepia, nothing but browns, and it makes him want to nod off but Dean keeps pressing, keeps shaking at him with one arm wrenched behind him to get at Sam’s shoulder.

“Oh, no, no you don’t get to fall asleep yet, Sam. You gotta tell me where the hell I’m supposed to go, you hear me? Sam!”

Sam feels shriveled up on the inside, defeated and dry. It’s not that nauseating sensation that’s had him all curled up into himself for hours since he hallucinated, but it’s comparable enough keep him fixed in place, rigid. 

“Open your eyes, man!”

Sam grunts, pads of his fingers scrubbing at his eyelids until they’re tender, close to bruising. The sky is a darkened violet with the storm and the night, and Sam’s body clock, fucked as it is, is dying for a little sleep, especially after their little interruption at the motel. 

“Slow down, Dean.”

He can barely see the dots and dashes of the roadside, the car pushing ninety on an open highway where it’s all just straight ahead from here, no choice but North, and Sam has no clue what Dean needs him awake for. His head is spinning, though, wired up like he’s wasted. It feels a little like a migraine fused with car sickness, but like, tripled. 

Dean makes this rasping sound and then he starts yelling but Sam’s hardly listening.  
“No fucking way, dude. You know what the fuck I just saw back there? Christ, you coulda killed somebody, who the hell knows what that was, I - How are you so fucking calm, huh? You ever gonna tell me what that was?”

Sam’s eyes roll back. “I had a vision,” he mutters.

“No you fuckin’ didn’t, Sammy. I-I’ve seen you after those, I know what you’re like. You were downright out of it Sam, tripping. You didn’t know who I was!”

Dean is so goddamn melodramatic, Sam thinks mutely. He closes his eyes, tries to tune him out, but Dean slams on the brakes right in the middle of the fucking road, just before the first turn they’ve seen in fifty miles, and Sam’s heart suffocates his lungs. 

“Dean!”

His brother looks back at him like he dares him to argue, his eyes little slits of black. 

“We don’t go any further until I know what we’re running from.” 

It’s not something Sam’s gonna open up about right now and so he just glares right back, this blazing sense of betrayal by Dean keeping him barred up. 

“I don’t know what it was, Dean. I just… for a moment there, I thought you were something else. I couldn’t - I had a little trouble figuring out what was what, that’s all.”

Dean bites his lip, doubtful, but he sits up straighter, cracks his wrists. Dean gets so fucking restless when he’s scared.

“Something else? What did you see, Sam?”

Sam hisses through his two front teeth, pinches his nose and tries unsuccessfully to tick his eyebrows in that menacing way Dean masters so well. There’s a long pause and Sam is staring blankly at the shrouded grey of the mist in the road, the kind that hangs stubborn and heavy on the backs of your shoulders, like water that can’t be shaken off.

“The demon, Dean. I thought I saw Yellow Eyes, okay?”

Dean takes a long breath out. “No, you thought I was Yellow Eyes. S’that sound more like it?”  
And isn’t it just like Dean to get pissy at Sam no matter what he tells him or doesn’t tell him. He frowns, his eyes pricking up with moisture at the corners where he’s kept them open too long - they’re just tiny slits of thinning amber in the rearview mirror. 

“Yeah, I don’t know, I guess I did. But that doesn’t mean I know where we’re s’posed to go from here, you get that, right?”

Things are starting to sift through to Sam’s subconscious and make sense to him. He vaguely remembers Dean’s hand under his chin, those fingers pawing at him, searching, and some of the bullshit Dean was spewing, all of these apologies like this had somehow been his fault. 

There’s not much Sam hates more than pity.

Dean’s staring at him like he could throttle him, but behind all that is that same kind of helpless look in his eye that Sam hasn’t seen since they were boys. Hiding in their Dad’s closet when a hunt had followed John home, a gun behind Dean’s back while he whispered to Sam to “please, stop, stop crying, Sammy”. 

“What’re we supposed to do then?” Dean asks, and his voice actually cracks.

Around the corner comes this jet black Jeep, swerving and speeding like it doesn’t know the meaning of a two-lane road, and it’s gunning it straight for them, and Sam’s eyes go wide, headlights that blind him and make his eyes look like searchlights, right before he doubles over and clutches his head. 

The Jeep loses speed with a hard brake, comes cutting across the road and blocks both lanes, so fucking close to the Impala that it has Dean cursing and wheezing, the bright greens of his eyes blown out and gawking at Sam like he might have just missed it, or something.

Nobody moves for a minute and then Dean cuts his hands through his hair, wicked fast movement that ends when he goes for his gun, tucks it right under his belt and tells Sam to wait here.

Sam rolls his eyes at the floor. He’s long since gotten over the fact that Dean hardly registers him as his own person. 

It’s raining so hard that Dean’s hair flattens to his skull like a wet paste, might as well have poured a bucket of water over his own head, doused so hard Sam can’t even make out the droplet marks on his shoulders anymore. 

He watches Dean until he’s buried beneath the fog, sneaking up on the driver’s side with his gun cocked. He can’t see much, but the Jeep door swings open, that much he can tell. 1… 2… 3… ten seconds later and no shots are fired and Sam’s ready to go after his brother, and then, there it is.

Three ballistic shots, the thwack of something metal, and Sam knows without a doubt that Dean’s hit something, but it’s maybe not what he was after because his brother comes running back with his hands behind his head, prisoner hold. 

Sam’s spine straightens in his seat despite the fucking burning behind his eyes and he unbuckles, goes to see what’s got Dean so fucking insane right now but Dean guns the engine and puts the car in reverse, and he’s actually gone white, the paling of his skin sending the shocking green of his eyes into full force. 

A single second and Sam is knocked back and pinned to the seat with the force of it, Dean sending them reeling back with his foot to the floor. He groans, his head on the verge of imploding already, the force of that fucking headache and all. 

There’s a loud screech from behind and Sam and Dean crane their necks in unison, see another car pull up to their bumper but all of that dust kicked up in the mist and Sam can’t get make nor model out of it, especially useless in this weather.

Not a second later and they’re running out onto the asphalt, guns blazing, last of their rounds loaded into the dashboard of some old Subaru. And when they get close enough for the mist to thin out, there’s this ugly little fucker in the front seat, all cut up but otherwise unharmed, and when he grins at them, Sam’s head sears with the energy of an entire star exploding, makes him reel back and smack his palm against the hood, panting. He raises one arm to hold Dean off, let him know he’s gonna be fine, but it drops all on its own, twitching. 

Dean shoots him this look, his eyes all cast downward and if he’s trying to hide his worry he’s not doing a splendid job, his teeth pressed deep into his lip. 

“Sam,” he says, a whisper, watching him in the muted gloom.

“Dean!” Sam shrieks, clutching his head with his face all pinched in pain, but his eyes are on the Subaru. 

The dashboard explodes with this tar-black smoke - floods the engine, escapes through the roof in this sickening flood of heat. Sam points, and Dean’s eyes fall on the open mouth of the driver, tipped to the sky and jaw torn wide, where the smoke pours. 

The driver collapses in a heap against the wheel, falls just short of a jagged piece of glass that would have easily done him in, straight through the heart. 

Dean dives for him, checks the kid’s pulse, but pulls his hand back like lightning, horrified.

“Fucker is freezing. Has to have bit the dust forever ago.”

Dean makes a face and grabs for Sam’s wrist, holds the pad of his thumb to the guy’s neckline, and Sam feels a twist of remorse.

“It’s cold. Jesus, Dean, this kid can’t be older ‘an seventeen. The hell happened?”

Dean only grunts, swiping a droplet from where it had been mid-drip on his brow, palm rising shakily to his forehead. Sam grounds him with a thump to his shoulder, tipping his head to rest against it. His ears were ringing. Dean’s arm shook with the impact of a one-man gunfight. 

Rainwater soaked the underside of Sam’s deepest cotton t-shirt layer, chilled his back and neck. Dean’s teeth chattered. 

“Something’s comin’, little brother.”  
__________________

They took the turn into town, nothing to say between them that didn’t come off hoarse and broken, and Sam never once tried to sway Dean away from drinking on the road. It would’ve been totally futile, anyway. 

This town, ten minutes in, and Sam hasn’t seen a single person, the clouds still hanging heavy enough to keep pouring, and he wonders when that’s supposed to stop. 

They haven’t reached civilization yet, just back town roads that leave acres of land between this neighbor and the next, muddy ruins of roads that, Sam marvels, Dean hasn’t cussed out for ruining Baby’s undercarriage once. 

The little houses along the way were all lit, and a few of the bars they hit once their wheels touched pavement again had enough cars parked out front to advertise people lived here, are living here, but no pedestrians as of yet. It’s late, sure, but if this town is as late to bed as he suspects from all of the televisions on, there should be at least a few of them out. Sam supposes that would be kind of strange, if it weren’t for the storm. 

Dean keeps reforging the steering wheel with this brutal grip of his, staring at Sam in this blank, unremarkable way that shouldn’t make his heart into a skipping stone, but it does. 

“Gotta piss, Sam.”

Sam sighs, shakes his head with a worn-out smile.

“Stop somewhere, then.”

“Nah, I’m gonna wait. Baby’s dying for fuel, anyway. ‘Sides, I hate pissing in the rain.”

Sam takes his chance, tries to make light of it all with a little shimmy of his shoulder and a wider smirk.

“What? Scared t’get yer dick wet, brother?”

Dean tenses, looks at him sharply, but it’s not as cold as it could be. His fingers still pulverize the wheel and it’s a wonder he can still steer like that. Sam sighs. So fucking much for small talk. 

“Hey. It’s gonna be fine.” It’s a multi-faceted kind of statement and Dean catches on quick, rolls his eyes. “Just… find us a 24-hour minimart, somethin’ like that, okay?”

He doesn’t mention he could fall asleep, standing. Dean doesn’t say anything at all.

They stumble into the parking lot of a decrepit little Grab n’ Jet and Dean doesn’t make a single dick joke, so Sam knows there’s something up. It’s a yellowing shack that advertises lottery ticket wins and milk for two bucks a gallon, and the sign doesn’t read ‘Closed’ but there’s no one at the front desk, either. 

They bust in with the wind, whole posters taped up with Scotch floating to the floor where they hung from the door. The humidity has steamed the glass over, weakened the tape, and Sam steps over a ‘For Sale’ sign for a kid’s bicycle “in perfect condition”. Dean pitches straight for the bathroom, but Sam goes for food and supplies, scans the place for any kind of security system that might tip someone off.

He snatches some trail mix and an energy drink, grimaces at the label, but pops it open on the spot because fuck if he’s expected to make it the rest of the night without a boost. He throws in a packet of Skittles for his brother and swings around the register to grab a pack of smokes for Dean, some weak attempt to pacify him. He winces, dives for a bottle of Tylenol Migraine Relief, just in case.

No one’s around, and it’s not like these aren’t extenuating circumstances, but Sam doesn’t have the spine to steal, and besides, the last thing they need is to get caught swiping in a town they might need to lay low in for a while. So he throws down his last unbroken twenty and takes a swig of his drink, taps at the floor with his heel. Dean is so goddamn slow sometimes.

Dean is right on cue when he collides with Sam, who jolts like he’s been freshly tased, wound too tight for Dean to be close to pushing him over with the shove of his shoulders. He glares, shakes his brother off, but Dean gets his fingers into Sam’s shirt, and that’s when Sam gets a good look at his face. He’s looking like he’s about to have a stroke, big eyes that swell out of his skull and blushing, actually blushing, Dean Winchester is, prods at Sam in a fixed hold to keep him pressed to his side.

“You need to see this, brother.”

Sam laughs at him, sarcastic and bitter because it’s just like Dean to scare him into thinking something’s wrong. 

“What, someone forget to flush the toilet?”

Dean’s mind is stuck on a loop, and he won’t stop shaking his head and swallowing so he’s gasping. Sam can tell he’s trying not to laugh, all the more reason not to trust him.

“Spit it out, Dean, I’m not going anywhere with you, not ‘till then.”

“Dude,” Dean spits out, his chest betraying him with spasming laughter, but he’s still looking mighty fucking shook up. “I can’t make this up. I found the owner. Come- come see.”

Sam shakes his head, flecks of water shaking into his eyes and Dean brushes his hair off of his forehead without thinking. Sam gives him an odd look. Dean flinches, an apology.

“You’re not kidding.” 

“Oh man, wish I was, brother.”

Sam’s eyes are well-trained to roll back in annoyance, but Dean cocks his brow before they can go for it already. 

“You’re curious. C’mon, I know you are. I think I mighta found us a case.”

Dean tugs him along, straight back to the aisle behind the cooler that reads “Little Boys’ Room” and Sam snorts, long fingers that curl around Dean’s wrist so he’ll pry off a little, give his blood a little room to circulate. Dean growls, doesn’t let up, and then he shoves Sam in by the back of his head, navigates him around the trashcan and the CAUTION WET FLOOR sign to the urinal. 

Dean hauls him right over to the back of a man standing over the toilet, and Sam thinks, it must be the owner, but then Dean doesn’t stop shoving, just pushes him right into the back of this guy, and instantly, Sam shields his eyes, blood rushing to the tips of his ears.

“Dean!” He shuffles back, trips over Dean’s foot, who won’t stop laughing, like, get a load of this, but Sam can’t stop apologizing to the man, who’s still back to them over the urinal, seemingly unfazed enough. 

“Man, I am so sorry, my brother’s a dick, I-”

His voice falls short when the guy doesn’t move, doesn’t even try cussing them out or rushing them out of his store. Sam gets a good look and he’s still just as hunched over the bowl, stock-still like he was when they found him. 

Sam’s mouth falls closed, lax jaw colliding his bottom teeth with his top. 

“Is he-”

Dean grins. “Found him like that, with his dick still in his hands. Not a fun way to die, huh?”

Sam balks, cuffs the back of Dean’s head. “The guy’s dead?! And you tried to fuckin’ prank me with his corpse? Dean, what the fuck?!”

Dean holds out his hand, signalling for Sam’s, and Sam gives it to him, frowning. He’s pretty sure Dean is about to drop something into it, but he doesn’t, just puts every finger down but one, and pokes the guy with the last one. 

“Christ, Dean!” Sam punches him in the arm, snatches his hand back. He’s still blushing and he hates that he’d laughed at Dean for it earlier. 

“He’s not dead, Sam. Least . . . not yet. Just, relax.”

Sam made a whining sound, disbelief. “What is this, then?”

Dean shrugs, his head hanging loosely on his neck, chin down. “I think he just froze that way.” 

Nothing made any sense, hadn’t for days now, and Sam is delirious with exhaustion. Dean’s a solar panel for all of Sam’s pent-up rage, his own little reservoir of a projection board, and so when Sam goes after him for being so insensitive about the poor guy, he supposes Dean must have seen it coming. 

He’s just so foggy, so messed up over this and he needs a shot shower and a way to roll his spent shoulders out. They’re okay in every physical sense, but it’s been pretty impossible to make predictions from one moment to the next, and Sam’s sick of trying. This was just supposed to be a pit-stop. 

“Great. So, now what?” Sam hisses, folding his arms over his chest. 

Dean raises an eyebrow at him. 

“We go take a look around. See if anyone’s seen anything that’ll clue us in.”

Sam huffs, clicks his nails against his teeth but doesn’t chew, has relatively kicked the habit. Dean must know the look, because he lets him think. 

“I don’t think that’ll do us any good.”  
Dean breathes out all at once, exasperated. “Oh yeah? Why’s that?”

Sam makes a face like it’s all so obvious, looking at the floor because if he looks at Dean he might slaughter him. So much for a hit and run. They could be here for days, now. And with something tailing them?

“Fuck!” 

He kicks at an open stall and it slams shut with a bang, rust that creaks in protest. It swings back open again, a pendulum’s swing. He lets his shoulders fall.

“Because. Notice how empty the streets are? I’m pretty sure this guy isn’t the only one. And, anyway. Whatever that was on the road into this place? Someone’s tryin’ to keep us here.”

Dean narrows his eyes. Sam spies a spot of blackened blood on his brother’s boot that wasn’t there before. It confirms his theory that Dean got at least one good shot in, makes him smile just a little before it’s gone. 

“All the more reason to get the fuck out of here, then, kid.”

Slight shake of Sam’s head, unsure. He’s too tired to be thinking this through to its full potential, but they can’t leave yet. 

“Eventually. Let’s just… can’t we find a place to stay for the night, first?”

Dean’s face contorted with the further shock of the thought, like even the idea was unbelievable. 

“You want to… stay? Especially after what we just went through? You’re out of your goddamn mind.”

They stand together with Sam’s back to the wall, and Dean gets real close the way he does when he’s trying to start a fight or talk some sense. With all of these mixed signals, Sam’s betting it’s both. He bares his teeth, forces his shoulders to straighten.

“We’re not leaving until I know what the fuck is screwing with my goddamn head.”

Dean throws his hands up, hisses at the ceiling. “This place has nothing to do with it! So what, we got a case on the way out of saving your ass. It’s a fuckin’ anomale, you hear me?”  
He’s staring at the slick of Sam’s throat where the water’s pooled, begging with his eyes. Sam can tell he’s scrambling for anything to get him to change his mind. He clings to Sam’s shoulders, like that will somehow be enough to get them to hightail it out of this place, but Sam’s eyes cloud with warning signs.

“It’s not an option, Dean. You wanna protect me? Find us a place to stay the night and we’ll talk about how we can get this over with tomorrow.”

It’s a new tone, one he hasn’t used in a while at least, and it’s almost like it softens Dean a little, or maybe that’s the utter helplessness they’ve got going for them.

Dean gulps, stuffs his hands into his back pockets and gives Sam enough room to get out from under him. He stares at the ground. Sam stares at him.

“Okay. Okay, you’re right.” It took a lot out of Dean, Sam knows, and he offers a slight smile in return. “But- if you’re right about this, what’s stopping these things from unfreezing at any point? Shouldn’t we, like, crash in the car, just in case?”

Sam shudders. “No way. Demons are probably looking for the car if they don’t already have us right where they want us.”

A slow nod from Dean, then a shiver. “God, I just hate the idea of waking up to a bunch of angry, freshly-livened mannequins, you know?”

Sam laughs. “We’ll take an unoccupied room, I promise. No one’s gonna wake up to us in their living room.”

It doesn’t make him happy, but Dean agrees relatively quickly. They leave the Gas n’ Jet owner to his own devices (Dean’s suggestion, in exactly those words). Better not to move him should he wake up, Sam had agreed, but also, just, gross. 

They take (steal, just this time) two of only three of good, plain black umbrellas from the stocking closets - Colorado probably doesn’t get enough rain to make any worthwhile money off of them, anyway, was Sam’s rationale. A little rain never hurt anybody, but these fucking hurricane-worthy shocks of spray do the trick just fine, and it doesn’t look like there are any signs of it stopping, either. 

Dean goes for the candy aisle but Sam chucks Skittles - paid for - at his head and tells him they better fucking get out of there before things go to hell further. Dean catches them before they fall to the ground, strides to Sam and holds him in place with the back of his neck, kisses his cheek. 

It’s like nothing gets to him when it comes to the job. Sam chuckles fondly.  
_________________

They gas up the car and wind up cruising towards a Bed & Breakfast, because it’s Monday, Dean cajoled, and there’s no way this town had enough couples to fill every King-sized bed in the place. 

Sam keeps his window open so the rain can help sting him awake, hanging halfway out until the wind takes his breath, and Dean has to tug him back by his collar. Sam’s mouth twitches up and he catches his smiling face in the mirror. 

Dean tries for a smile, too. “Hey, how’s your head, baby?”

Sam’s grin grows wider, even as his teeth rattle like the car over potholes, freezing. He thinks, for whatever way shit is about to hit the fan, as it inevitably does for them, at least this part never changes. It might get bad, but as long as there’s Dean, Dean and this thing between them.

“Better, now.”

“Good, Sammy. That’s good.”

Dean nods at him, waves of relief that wash over him in a way Sam can’t miss. He strokes his thumb over Sam’s neck like he’s cherishing something he’d almost lost somehow. Sam just beams back. He knows it’s the first sign of good news Dean’s had in weeks.


End file.
